love overgrows a rock

lol I guess I'm also capable of posting things on DW that aren't book reviews, aren't I. I'm sorry for how absent I am around here; for some reason I can never keep it in my brain that my rlist is another social media feed I can/should check in addition to Mastodon and Tumblr. But I hope you're all doing well.

The last month or so for me has been...rough. I fucked my back up again - hilariously, it happened about a month after I caught myself thinking, "wow, I haven't had back pain in ages, am I cured?!" - and it's really limiting my mobility. It is slowly getting better, but the improvement is happening slowly enough that I have to keep reminding myself to think back on how bad it was for the first two weeks after it first happened, because otherwise it feels like there's no movement happening at all. And then because of the limited mobility, a whole bunch of other areas of my life have fallen apart: housekeeping, cooking, Christmas shopping, errands, my social life, etc. My to-do list is very long and my overwhelm is very, very high.

Today I have to write two cover letters for two more practicum placement opportunities. The first two agencies I got matched with sat on my resume for weeks and then rejected me without so much as an interview, and the third is in the sitting-on-my-resume-for-weeks phase now. My grad program has a rule where each student can only have one potential match at a time, but the field placement coordinator emailed the other day with two additional matches on top of the one I'm waiting on, I assume because she too is freaked out by how little time left there is to secure me a placement for January. That whole situation is very stressful. I'm trying not to panic.

I fly across the country to visit family on the 20th. I am...trepidatious. The flight will be hard on my back, and spending a bunch of time with my parents will be hard on the rest of me. Also, catsitting is expensive. Really the only part of that whole situation that I'm looking forward to is getting to see headstone and our friend Mara.

But hey, books are good! I like to read books. I enjoyed the last two novels I read, as my previous posts from this month indicate. And I have only one paper left to write this semester, plus one another assignment to submit (unlike the paper, this one will be very easy), and then the only obligations I'll have until January are related to freelance work.

...Oh, plus I need to read a bunch of dense academic books to get ready for my research project next semester. I forgot about that. Well.

It's been months but I finally finished reading a fiction book again. (Grad school has been kicking my ass.) This one was Beasts of a Little Land by Juhea Kim, which I got in a cute little book swap a few of my friends and I did back in early September. I really liked it, and I'm still trying to do the thing where I write down my thoughts about books to facilitate me ever remembering anything about them, so here's a little review.

The synopsis from the author's website describes Beasts of a Little Land as an "epic story of love, war, and redemption set against the backdrop of the Korean independence movement", which I think captures the gist of it pretty well. It spans decades in the lives of an array of characters, particularly exploring the intertwined fates of Jade, a Korean courtesan; JungHo, a Korean revolutionary; and Yamada, a Japanese military officer. The "beasts" of the title are tigers but also, metaphorically, the citizens of Japanese-occupied South Korea. I quite like how the Kirkius review summed that motif up:

Late in the book a Japanese general will remark, "How such enormous beasts have flourished in this little land is incomprehensible." He is referring to tigers, but he might as well be talking about the humans who fight here, too.

So, my thoughts, with some spoilers:

This book pleasantly surprised me in a number of ways. I thought I could predict the overall shape of the plot, and I was wrong. The "romance" that was projected from early on is not actually a requited romance. Chekhov's gun went off, but not in the way I thought it would. I worried, based on the subject matter and how some things are framed early in the story, that the novel would take a hardline nationalist stance, and it actually doesn't; as the characters grow up and lose things/people/ideals and face colonial and political violence, the idea that unfolds is more like "you can love your country as much as you want, but your country is never going to love you back." (I'm not at all an expert on Korean history or politics, so please note that it's entirely possible there are nuances that are going right over my head! I suspect that's the case, in fact, particularly in the final chapter, which introduces a few Haenyeo characters. But what I can say is that Beasts of a Little Land did not become the uncomplicated tale of national heroes fighting for the motherland that I, perhaps cynically, worried it might be.)

I'm picky when it comes to prose, and in my opinion, the prose in this book was good but not great. It was certainly more pleasurable to read than a lot of fiction I pick up, but I did sometimes want to take a red pen to it, and it was sprinkled throughout with little pet peeves of mine. Interestingly, those pet peeves were ones that tend to show up a lot in fiction that has been translated from an East Asian language to English (I read a lot of such fiction for job reasons!), except as far as I can tell, Kim wrote Beasts of a Little Land in English from the jump. I mentioned this to Harry, who suggested that maybe the author just reads a lot of translated fiction herself, and I suppose that's entirely possible. But all of that being said...there were moments toward the end of the novel where the prose needed to reach for poetic heights, and in those instances, I really felt Kim rose to the occasion. So I can't critique her prose too harshly overall, because it did great work in the moments where it counted.

Also, the back fifth of the novel made me breathtakingly sad, and I love it when a book makes me sad. So all in all, I definitely recommend this book. Do be warned though that there are a couple of rape scenes which, while not graphic, do not pull their punches.