Book Review: I Have the Right to Destroy Myself by Young-ha Kim (transl. by Chi-Young Kim)

 

I Have the Right to Destroy Myself by the South Korean author Young-ha Kim - translated by the multi-awarded Chi-Young Kim - is not an easy reading. I have guilty reading pleasure and some books are easier than others. There are so many different ways to like and/or write your books. Sometimes a story is enough and it can be a love story or a drama or a children story. Sometimes a book or a story or even a sentence can shake you strongly and you forget about yourself or just stop reading anything else because you are overwhelmed by thoughts. What is indeed important for me is the power of words, no matter the wraping it is delivered. I love books and reading, that´s clear.

´Novels are food for the leftover hours of life, the in-between times, the moments of waiting´.

I Have the Right to Destroy Myself is a very intense reading. Intense as in stirring slowly feelings and fears. It was written in 1996 and translated 11 years after. There is an outside voice, a writer and a ´suicide designer´ helping - at least - two women: Judith and Mimi to kill themselves. There are cultural references associated with death in the Korean culture that one may be keen to read about, but there is also a matter-of-factly indifference and resilience towards the details of the everyday life. There is a cinematic impression of all the movements of the mundane episodes, which may sound absurd and unrelated but the everyday life is not a happening, it is filled and full of simple details.

The women are unusual. Judith, for instance, shabbed her sex partner in the eye with a ChupaChups lollipop she is always consuming. Women look like demonic mysteries hiding powerful black magic forces while the men are confused and without a path, except getting lost in sex. Dead and sex, there is clearly a classical dynamic between the two, in the most organic possible way that was deleted by our modern culture. We avoid dead, we hide it under our politeness and easygoing lives. We don´t need the drama of death, as we are supposed to live for ever and only few are damned to abandon this world.

There are musical - from the domain of jazz and blues, mostly - and also visual arts references which are opening up so many ways in which one can look at this very short novel. As a reader, I felt like looking at it from outside a prism. From each corner, there are different layers of ideas visible: discussion about sex and death, or about why we do arts or about how arts may be a way of dying. 

I confess that there are still many concepts and directions that I may not necessarily connect with, or accept, but the discussion only stimulates the brain and the intellectual challenge. That´s one of the reasons I love reading books and talk about them.

Rating: 3.5 stars