The Girl Who Wrote Loneliness - by Kyung-Sook Shin (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

The Girl Who Wrote Loneliness is a stark and lyrical work that follows a teen-aged girl who has just arrived in Seoul to work in a factory while struggling to achieve her dream of finishing school and becoming a writer. Shin sets the this complex and nuanced coming of age story against the backdrop of Korea's industrial sweatshops of the 1970's and takes on the extreme exploitation, oppression, and urbanization that helped catapult Korea's economy out of the ashes of the war. Millions of teen-aged girls from the countryside descended on Seoul in the late 1970's. These girls formed the bottom of the city's social hierarchy, forgotten and ignored. Richly autobiographical, the novel lays bare the conflict and confusion Shin goes through as she confronts her past and the sweeping social change that has taken place in her homeland over the past half century. The Girl Who Wrote Loneliness has been cited in Korea as one of the most important literary novels of the decade, and cements Shin's legacy as one of the most insightful and exciting young writers of her generation.

Review Quotes

Haunting. The novel's language, so formal in its simplicity, bestows a grace and solemnity.

The most moving and accomplished, and often startling, novel in translation I've read in many seasons. Every sentence is saturated in detail.

The tone is as dreary as its topic, but it is a fictional account of what absolutely must be told and known. Intense but revealing historical fiction that the author calls something between 'not quite fact, not quite fiction.'

A moving portrayal of the surprising nature, sudden sacrifices, and secret reveries of motherhood.

Affecting. How does an author write about a troubled land when her sorrow is so great? Shin's novel provides a powerful record of the time.

Intimate and hauntingly spare. A raw tribute.

Shin writes about a time and setting that may seem remote to many Americans, but in many ways her specificity is universal; we all have a monster that has no face, and which we try to avoid. Shin paints her own monster for us.

Shin's unemotional delivery and understated yet devastating perspective on her country's expectations and norms are familiar from her earlier novels, but this book's grim glimpse into the lives of factory girls is notably haunting. There's a hypnotic quality to this melancholy coming-of-age story described as 'not quite fact and not quite fiction.' Allusive and structurally sophisticated, it melds Shin's characteristic themes of politics, literature, and painful experience into a mysteriously compelling whole.

About the Author

Kyung-Sook Shin is one of South Korea's most widely read and acclaimed novelists. She is the author of I'll Be Right There and Please Look After Mom, which was a New York Times bestseller and a Man Asian Literary Prize winner.