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language: Korean (English tr. Chi-Young Kim)
country: South Korea
year: 2011
form: novel
genre(s): literary
dates read: 9.8.24-12.8.24
Kim Ae-ran’s My Brilliant Life (tr. Chi-Young Kim) is ultimately a fairly predictable novel about a terminally ill sixteen-year-old boy named Aerum, one of the few hundred people in the world with progeria. the book is narrated in first person, as Aerum reflects on his life, his parents’ relationship, and various other things. the blurb suggests that the book is mainly about Aerum writing a fictionalized version of the story of his parents’ relationship as a final gift to them, but in point of fact he kind of gives up on this project — that conceit only lasts for about the first 2/5 of the book.
while it’s certainly in many ways quite cliché and, I found, rather underwhelming as a result (though not bad, except in its rather tedious reliance on The Nuclear Family as its emotional core), I will say that even though Aerum is rather precious for a sixteen-year-old, a) this is in a way that’s, like, not not how I imagined myself as a Sensitive, Intellectual teenager and b), more importantly, the novel is refreshingly unpretentious in spite of this — the style is direct and feels more or less plausible, and as a result it’s an engaging, fast-paced read even as I was rolling my eyes a bit at times.
the big issue is really Aerum’s relationship with a girl who sees a story about him on a human interest program and reaches out to email him. this would be fine in and of itself — I actually thought their email exchanges were maybe the strongest part of the book — except that then out of nowhere and for no particular reason that I can see the girl is revealed to be a thirty-something man using Aerum for writing material for his screenplay. there’s not much by way of follow-up after this revelation, except that someone who may be that thirty-something man shows up at one point in Aerum’s hospital room, says one sentence, and then disappears. Aerum forgives him for the deception because he found joy and meaning in the letters from “Lee Seoha” anyway.
charitably, perhaps this is Kim acknowledging that there’s a certain voyeuristic quality to someone who is, as far as I know, not a terminally ill teenager writing this story. if so, choosing to represent the author-voyeur as the classic image of the Evil Online Predatory Man crossed with the transmisogynistic Evil Man In A Dress is not a good choice. if this wasn’t the goal, I do not know what the point was — all other things aside, it’s just a bizarre deviation from the plot (such as it is), especially since there’s basically no follow-through.
with this significant hesitation in mind, it’s a reasonably engaging though not, I found, particularly inventive book.
moods: lighthearted, reflective, sad