Whale : Cheon Myeong-Kwan
Cheon' Whale is one of the finest novels I have read in decades. It will be classics in everywhere everytime. Even readers from the Bronze age would be delighted to have it inscribed on stones to read.
At the first few pages, Chunhui’s narrative rose up rapidly like her heavyweight. I have a distaste when the narrative flows like a super cyclone. Readers take a long leap from plot A to B without having a breathing space. But it turns surprisingly into the opposite direction to pull my attention when Cyanide enters with her ‘sweeping’ life and ‘piling’ death and I sails with admirable prose, salacious imagery and narrative styles of Korean Cheon Myeong-Kwan’s Whale [2023].
I haven't read novels for many years, with the narrative style of folk tales where rumors, myths, legends, superstition, prophecy and dissimilarity rule over the characters and the stories. Like the thugs and one-eyed woman, I felt a heavy urge to know where did the old crone hide her fortunes? I felt the need to request Cheon to rewrite the chapters.
I am fascinated by Geumbok's audacity, ambition and persuasive skills and nature. Whale is giving me a similar scent of Shahidul Jahir's Sei Raate Purnima silo".
I am totally stunned more by the law of employment than the previous one, even the law of love. I didn't ever think the way Geokjeong took cotton for ears and cloth for mouth. Cheon's Geumbok is Jahir's Nayantara.
The tragedies of Geokjeong and whale have moved Geumbok with the same degree that remind us there is absolute power that stays for eternity. Everything must come to a vanishing point.
The scenes of cutting fingers one by one for the attainment of Naoko’s love and for the achieving oyabun’s loyalty have given me the same kind of resonance in Martin Mc Donagh’s ‘The Banshees of Inisherin’ [2022] where Colm Doherty did the brutal and violent cutting to detain his friend Pádraic Súilleabháin. Though the purposes of the acts are polar opposite, the persistence and engraving to do these acts are quite similar.
One of the heart rendering episodes of the novel is Geokjeong’s seclusion with his leviathan magnitude and his disillusionment from Geumbok’s betrayal sourced out of her destitute and laws of love and courtship with the scar man. I was also amazed to learn Cheon Myeong-Kawan’s imagination of whale in 2004 long before Darren Aronofsky’s Whale [2022], the eponymous title.
"During that time, there was no difference between the living and the dead. Death became so commonplace that it was no longer an anomaly."
The narration of the Korean war [1950-53] has just appeared all of a sudden in a magical realist setup and I got a splinter in my thought but felt a great amusement in the style. No one can, but the victims only can have the real feeling like Geumbok had in the novel.
"Reader, I ask for your understanding! It goes beyond the scope of this book and requires even more pages and more time, along with courage and tears to move through the pain."
Addressing the readers directly in the narrative voice disconnects me from my reading pace. When I had been reading Bangkim and Robindrath’s novels, I noticed the same descriptive techniques they used in the Bengali novels and stories which I did not quite fit with well.
Whale [2023]
고래 [2004]
Cheon Myeong-Kwan
Trans by Chi-Young Kim
Korean, South Korea
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