More of a 3.5 stars. This was a weird one for me, because I do think the blurb hypes it up to be a bit more than it is. We follow Inji, who works at a marriage agency, and we follow her job as a wife to a music producer. Whilst very little happens, it's very well translated and humorous in lots of places. The characters are likable, it's pacing is great, but I do feel like it was quite a nothingness of a book. The expected drama, wasn't really that. Overall I did genuinely enjoy the book despite my criticism, but I think I expected a little more from it given the blurb, as well as the synopsis for the Netflix adaptation.

Ooh I found this one a bit tricky! I was expecting a thriller so kept waiting for the pace to speed up but it didn't. However, once I'd accepted this wasn't what I'd expected, I found a lot to enjoy about The Trunk. I really loved the narrative voice of the main character, and the whole novel is a fascinating insight into modern life in Korea. I LOVED the character of Granny, the older neighbour with her much younger boyfriend. I couldn't quite get my head around the concept of the short-term marriage contracts - it just didn't ring true for me.

However, it was great to read something different and to get a real insight into a society I know very little about (including the dizzying array of different types of kimchi!).

"The type of woman who wants to get married at least once. According to the gallery woman, that was the category I fell under. So, this was the world we lived in, one where even spouses could be rented. W&L charged NM members a high annual subscription and a matrimonial fee and, in return, offered them a selection of spouses. It was like the spouses were luxury personal items like a Dior perfume or a Birkin bag.

한번쯤 결혼해보고 싶은 여자. 그녀는 내가 그 범주에 속한다고 했다. 이제는 배우자도 임대하는 세상이 됐구나. 고액의 연회비와 혼인성사자금을 지불하는 회원들에게, 이런 아내는 어떠신가요? 하고 내미는 기호품이 된 기분이었다."

The Trunk (2024) is the English translation by the collective The KoLab of the 2015 novel 트렁크 by 김려령 (Kim Ryeo-ryeong), with a Netflix series based on the original due shortly.

The story behind the English translation is a fascinating one, prepared by a group of students in Australian universities as a colloborative exercise, rather than commissioned for publication. Those students led by Dr. Adam Zulawnik, at the University of Melbourne, and Yonjae Paik of the Australian National Univerisity, were Yoon-kyung Joo, Violet Reeves, Kiah Greenwood, Sunny Kandula, Cheyenne Lim, Keith Wong, Daniel Gage-Brown, Sneha Karri, Mimi Lee, Vienna Harkness, Injee Nam, Jamie Lim-Young, and Aditi Dubey (the latter of whom contributes an afterword).

I first came across the translation-in-progress via the website of the leading reviewer of Korean fiction in translation, Tony Malone, who reviewed on his blog and fed back on the first version of the translation, and whose contribution to the eventual publication of the novel is acknowledged by both Zulawnik and Paik in their respective afterwords.

It's a great initiative and hopefully not the last such one we will see.

The novel is narrated by Inji (인지), 29 years old and in her sixth year working as a FW (Field Wife) for NM (New Marriage) a elite, secretive division of the matchmaking company W&L (Wedding and Life) [the novel neatly skewering the corporate obsession with acronyms]. New Marriage takes matchmaking to a different level by providing temporary (typically 1 year) wives for clients who prefer to take a less conventional approach to matrimony, the marriage dissolved at the end of the contract with no need for a messy divorce.

Although as Inji's typically frank reaction when she is first approached to work in the division suggests, there is a potentially seedy side to the transaction:

"Contract spouses—what on earth? I remember thinking. FWs were just escorts, but with insurance and a high salary. This was institutionalized prostitution. Fuck, why have I been picked for this? Is that the sort of impression I gave her? I even considered reaching out to a journalist friend of mine to say that I had discovered a juicy story. If the story got some attention, I could maybe even get a gig out of it. “Breaking news! A dark secret hidden under the promise of love! Matchmaking company revealed to be escort service!”"

The UK blurb bills this as a 'feminist thriller' and, as with other reviewers, I have to say that it isn't that at all - it's more of a 'misogamistic melodrama', questioning the traditional institution of marriage (while pointing out the flaws of this rather radical alternative). And it's a topic which is key to South Korea's demographic crisis, with birth outside of wedlock (I use the old fashioned term deliberately given the context) is much lower than in most developed countries - e.g. from NPR,
"Korea saw 2.5% of births outside marriage in 2020; the U.S., by comparison, recorded 40.5%."

The thriller label is particularly odd in that there isn't really one central driving plot strand, but rather several, most of which aren't particularly resolved (and which I suspect will make for a rich mini-series:

- Inji's own developing thoughts as to whether she wants to stay working as a Field Wife, as she also navigates office politics;

- a co-field wife who has fallen pregnant during her marriage and wants to keep the child, even though her client husband doesn't;

- the unusual request of her latest 'the husband' (she doesn't refer to her clients by name in her own thoughts) that they renew the contract for another year;

- 'the husband's' rather secretive career as a music producer, working anonymously with an unnamed famous musician;

- 'Granny', Inji's neighbour, who is having a late-life fling with a toyboy, who seems to primarily use her to buy good from his pyramid marketing schemes;

- someone who Inji's friend introduces to her for a blind-date who turns into something of an obsessive stalker, not taking no for an answer and showering her with unrequested gifts of home made ddeok. And when the company have to intervene, this is turn leads to a story suggesting corruption and modern slavery within New Marriage;

- Inji's relationship with her best friend from school days, and their memories of their mutual friend who died at their coming-of-age party;

- her relationship with her mother, including hints of a romantic relationship her mother vetoed as Inji's paramour was bisexual ("Well, I actually prefer it coming in the other way" is Inji's retort when her mother says his acts with other men are unnatural).

Many of these explore, in a very unsentimental fashion, various aspects of sexuality, relationships and marriage, and working culture, although others (e.g. the music story) appear to be pure distractions.

But overall I think the novel is better for that - the messiness of the plot, and the lack of straightforward morals of the story reflecting the complexities and non-binary subtleties of modern-life.

3.5 stars rounded to 4 because of the story behind the translation.

I keep seeing The Trunk being promoted as a feminist thriller; however, I think if you go in expecting a thriller, you will be disappointed. I am calling it 'literary fiction' in this review, and I think that is a better classification; although, it doesn't fit 100% neatly into that genre either. Despite the possible mislabelling, it was a truly enjoyable read. I found the plot idea fascinating and got behind In-ji's narration right from the start. It was fun to follow her through the course of the novel, and her situation raised several thought-provoking questions. It may not have been quite what I'd expected from the blurb, but I was caught up in the tale throughout. I already had the forthcoming Netflix show on my to-watch list, and now I am even more excited for it, to see how they handle the adaptation. The prose was descriptive enough to paint the scene but was still easy, quick reading, and the pacing was nicely managed from start to finish. I am giving this one 4.5 stars.

A near-future world where you can buy a temporary wife. A year with a ‘husband’ - then you pack up and leave. Especially interesting in the context of South Korea, with the world’s lowest fertility rate.
Also fascinatingly translates by ‘committee’ - the translator notes (plural) are genuinely interesting

The Trunk is a novel about a woman who works as a 'Field Wife', a hired out temporary spouse for the rich, and what happens when one of her previous husbands hires her for another year of marriage. Inji took a job at matchmaking service Wedding & Life's secret division, in which people can pay for a field spouse to have a fixed term marriage with, when she didn't know what to do with her life, and now she's had five of these husbands. The most recent husband wants another year with her, and soon various people in her life, and secrets from the past, start to appear, in this satirical novel that explores modern marriage, sexuality, and gender expectations in South Korea.

This novel wasn't what I was expecting from how it is presented, as it is marketed as a feminist thriller, and between that and the title, I was expecting the protagonist to be involved in something like murder. Actually, the book is more about ideas of love and marriage, queerness and the space for people's lives and relationships to be more fluid, with a plot that is more focused on the protagonist's relationships to other people and things in the past that have impacted those relationships. There are some thriller-like elements—like her finding more shady stuff out about the company she works for, or the guy who won't stop pursuing her, or the mystery of how her schoolfriend died—but the book is really more meditative and character-focused, with a lot of satire as well, rather than a thrilling page turner.

The first half of the book focuses on Inji's work in the company and some of the people in her life, like her closest friend and the old granny who lives by her, and all of the characters are given a lot of quirks to explore how people's lives aren't straightforward. There's also her current husband, a rich music producer she has avoided finding out much about, and a guy who has started turning up at her work, demanding to know why she's not interested in him, and both of these two seem like something dramatic is going to happen, but then the second half of the book tells more of the story of her and her best friend, and their other friend who died after Coming of Age Day. as well as Inji's revelations about a manager at her company. This all makes it quite a varied novel, but I enjoyed that it wasn't a straightforward thriller, and instead questioned a lot of things about relationships, sex, and love that people tend to expect.

I struggle with the blurb which describes this as a feminist thriller - or a thriller at all - and it's quite a stretch to liken this to The Handmaid's Tale though I can at least see the reasons for that comparison even if they don't immediately spring to my mind. Instead, I'd say this is a book which tackles head-on, and with some verve and humour, the idea of marital, sexual and gendered conformity in South Korean society and the impact of that on Inji, a 30 year old Korean woman.

There's definitely a quirky premise here with a 'marriage bureau' which offers up 'field wives' (or husbands though we don't see so much of that) i.e. wives rented on short fixed term contracts. In this way the book merges social criticism from different fields: sexuality, capitalism and precarity, though the latter is seen as a convenience rather than a way of excluding people from stability.

The first-person narrator, Inji, is one of those alienated young women in fiction who is trying to navigate a world that doesn't work for her benefit: 'to me, the entire world was a desert - a desert so arid that surviving it was a feat [...] I couldn't tell what the desert wanted from me, but I suspected it was obedience. What I wanted was just to be able to walk wherever I wanted, as far as I wanted, even if my feet started to sink into the sand.'

With issues here of mental health, of queerness, of intergenerational conflict, and of monetisation of private life, there's a lot of interesting things going on. Inji, inevitably, has a tense relationship with her mother for reasons not made clear until the end, and we follow her through two 'field marriages' as well as a back story about two women with whom she's close.

It's an intriguing narrative though the pacing can feel a little off. The story doesn't quite fix to the scenario promised in the blurb and is actually more interesting than the corporate secrets thriller plot promised (though there is a bit of that as well). As with some other Korean fiction, there's something a little elusive and hazy about the story, almost as if it was originally bolder but then became diluted.

Nevertheless, this is an absorbing and consistently fascinating short novel that tackles its themes in a quasi figurative way that worked well for me.

A feminist thriller that is soon to be a Netflix k drama, this book was unique and intriguing and perfect for fans of Kim Jiyoung, born 1982

Really interesting book full of social commentary, rich characters, immersive cultural references with under currents of satire wit.

Told in the first person POV we taken to strange saying agency in Korean. Thus begins a very unusual style of thriller.

I can only say I had vibes of The Handmaiden's Tale meets Convince Store Woman, it was strange but very interesting. There was a lot great one liners and some really insightful comments( the coffee machine being simple and Granny's views on love being stands out)

I don't always get these books in full but I always enjoy them there are so different from a lot books that make the same sort of social remarks in western culture they are really unique in style. It is scary tho that woman all over the world face the same sort of issues regardless.

This book is translated well, I did have google a few phrases and terms but in most it has transported into English well.

The plot keeps you interested and it makes you think.

Thank you for the ARC I found this a great read.

Please be sure to read the afterword it is great it explains how the book was translated, came about and talks about the hidden deeper messages of the book.

Am excited to see this on the screen in the autumn

The Trunk is a book that explores the innovative concept of a matchmaking agency whose secret division offers a service of a very different kind: "field spouses" who perform wifely duties on a fixed term contract basis! This include everything from cooking to having sex with the employer.

Workers like Noh Inji undertake spousal responsibilities, according to their designated assignments, for varying periods of time. Inji has already done this several times before when she is summoned to resume her responsibilities with an earlier "husband". But this time around, things get rather more complicated...

This one is a thriller with a difference, written from a decidedly feminist perspective and satirizing the deeply- ingrained sexism in South Korean society. Worth checking out, the book gets 3.5 stars.