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Title: The Interpreter by Suki Kim ISBN: 0-374-17713-9 Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux Pub. Date: 21 January, 2003 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $24.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.88 (26 reviews)
Rating: 2
Summary: Readable with Perseverance
Comment: Suggest checking the NY Times book archives for a fair review. This is a first attempt for the author, and should be accepted and appreciated for the 50th percentile effort that it is. There are really two Korean-American stories here, one of depression and one a detective mystery, and they don't fit together very well. Speaking to the first, the reader has to decide roughly 70-80 pages in, when the novelty of the author's descriptions is starting to wear thin and become boring, whether to proceed. Kim is no Phillip Roth. I did continue, on hope that ethnic/cultural insights might make up for it. Can't say I felt sufficiently rewarded. As for the second, the mystery, it's not well constructed or particularly plausibly handled, i.e., it's more implanted than integrated with the first. To make matters worse, the last page of the book, the ultimate act of the mystery, makes no sense whatsoever relative to everything that's come before. In fact, I would call having the main character turn and solidarize with her parents, in spite of their long-term heinous social behavior toward other Koreans, an act of gross moral cowardice on the author's part (me-generation stuff?). A truly insightful and heroic effort would have had the daughter facing and living with, or being torn apart by, the ambiguity of these two poles. As it is, I wonder, had the daughter been Jewish and her parents pulled acted against other Jews in collaboration with the Nazi authorities, whether the JewishBooks and other reviewers here on amazon would have written so glowingly of this book.
There's a character in the book, a mostly absent gay roommate named Caleb, who's a throwaway, i.e., without useful purpose to the story. Ironically enough, however, he's the one given the two best lines by the author (284,286): "I'm so bored with blasphemy," and "You can only drive yourself crazy if you have no distance from the world." Not earth shattering insights either, but ones the author might do well to contemplate, especially if she wants to become more than a teller of morally empty depressed women's tales.
Rating: 2
Summary: ambitious... but doesn't pull it off
Comment: I really wanted to like this book, as I am a Korean-American who aspires to write. But I completely agree with the reviewer of "Some promise, but ultimately boring..." The plot is sloppy and repetitive--I don't need to be told multiple times about how many times Suzy moved in her life. And I realize the author is trying to show how Suzy is damaged from all the pain she's gone through in her life, but her impulsive actions just make her seem pretentious. And when the "mystery" was revealed, I thought it was borderline silly! The aspects of Korean-American immigrant life were insightful, but to the point that I left like I was reading a textbook--a little too educational. Maybe to a non-Korean, these descriptions might seem interesting--but I felt the author was trying too hard to be tourguide of Korean immigrant life in the US.
Incidentally, I know this writer is talented because I read an angaging, non-fiction account of her trip to North Korea in the NY Times. This leads me to believe that she just needs to work out some of her first author glitches. I'd be willing to give her a second chance.
Rating: 5
Summary: One of the best I've read in quite awhile
Comment: As other reviewers have noted, The Interpreter offers a third-person view of one Suzy Park whose life up to now can best be described as dysfunctional. She's survived two affairs with married men (although she's remarkably comfortable in her "mistress" role), dropped out a first-rate college, drifted from job to job, and kept only one friend.
Her present job, as a contract interpreter working for an agency, has held her longer than others. On one of her jobs, she translates for a witness who happens to know something about her parents, who died of gunshot wounds in 1995. She decides to investigate their death, her own past and the mysterious disappearance of her older sister Grace, who has always been distant.
Although the heroine is not especially appealing (you want to shake her and send her to a therapist, pronto), her life makes sense in terms of her background. A dysfunctional life comes from a supremely dysfunctional family -- with layers of mystery.
I had trouble putting the book down, although it had qualities of literary fiction and "girl books" as well as murder mystery. The author manages to give us a fresh view of New York, which has been the scene of so many novels. As I read I fondly remembered the Long Island Railroad and the stops on the Number 7 Queens line -- and the way they're counted out by riders. She also gives us a gritty but entertaining view of the Korean immigrant lifestyle as well as the realities of the legal proceedings where she translates. She reads between the lines and occasionally oversteps her boundaries, knowing immigrants have their own code and their own realities.
The sense of setting and the pacing make this novel succeed, despite the unsympathetic main character and the even less sympathetic romantic entanglements. Along with Suzy, we are exposed to one mystery after another. Why did the family move so often? Where did they get money to buy a store? Where are the family's citizenship papers? Why is the sister so aloof? Who murdered the parents and why?
Amazingly, Suki Kim ties up all these loose ends in the last two short chapters. The story behind the murder makes everything fit together, even the reason for her sister's aloofness (if we read between the lines).
The ending is satisfying but not happy. I am reminded of the oft-quoted psychological truth: People need meaning to be happy, but meaning doesn't necessarily bring happiness.
Heroine Suzy Park can now make a patterned quilt out of the scraps of her life. We're satisfied. She may never be.
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Title: In Full Bloom by Caroline Hwang ISBN: 0525947116 Publisher: E P Dutton Pub. Date: 24 March, 2003 List Price(USD): $23.95 |
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Title: The Foreign Student : A Novel by Susan Choi ISBN: 0060929278 Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: 01 September, 1999 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: When My Sister Was Cleopatra Moon by Frances Park ISBN: 0786886455 Publisher: Miramax Pub. Date: 13 June, 2001 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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Title: A Cab Called Reliable : A Novel About Growing Up In America by Patti Kim ISBN: 0312190301 Publisher: Griffin Trade Paperback Pub. Date: 15 June, 1998 List Price(USD): $10.95 |
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Title: Yellow: Stories by Don Lee ISBN: 0393323080 Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: May, 2002 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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