The Starlet and the Spy

It’s 1954 and outcast Alice Kim works as a translator for the US Army. She struggles to keep on keeping on after the horrors of war and the emotional wounds from her earlier romantic affairs. Alice gets chosen to translate for Marilyn Monroe who’s coming to Korea to entertain the troops, who remain.

Nervous, emotional and guilt-ridden, Alice feels alienated. A young woman, whose past haunts her must deal with seeing her past lovers and tries to track down an orphan she promised to care for.

While the story’s full of angst, I felt it lacked authenticity, which is surprising since the author researched war diaries and other primary sources. I felt there was too little Marilyn Monroe in the book and thought those chapters were based on stereotypes. I think Monroe was in the story to make it marketable.

The love triangle and the emotional crash that ensued when the married lover caught her in bed with her other lover didn’t endear Alice to me. She lacked the insight to figure out her own responsibility even though all the dots where there. I didn’t find the spy work compelling either.

I prefer Lisa See’s, Jung Chang’s and Winston Graham’s historical fiction. Ji-Min Lee’s The Starlet and the Spy is not a novel you must read.

 

The Trial

Even people who haven’t read Kafka’s The Trial know that it’s about an ambiguous character Josef K. who’s charged with unspecified crimes. It’s a very modern story in that themes of alienation and a brutal faceless bureaucracy abound. The story begins like a sprint as a shot goes off and there’s a lot of momentum in the plot.

As K. seeks to find out what he’s charged with and how he can defend himself, he meets men and women who’re mean, uncouth, certainly unhelpful or brutal. I agree with those who liken the story to a dream, though I’d categorize it as a nightmare. What’s real? How can K. face such injustice without any specific charges?

Other questions I had were: Why aren’t there any charges? Why do the characters representing art, religion and law exemplify only the failures of these institutions? What does Kafka want us to think of the brutality K. witnesses and experiences? What do these themes say about Kafka’s relationships failed, who found little happiness in his work.

I thought of rereading the book to get more of its message, but while I enjoyed Kafka’s style, I soon put the book down because I knew the end and didn’t want more nihilism in my life.

Kafka didn’t want this unfinished novel published, but after his death it was. I learned that and more from the BBC’s radio program In Our Time. The guests clarified much of The Trial’s mystery, but the insights also sickened me and made me ponder the darker corners of this novel, which I had read quickly.

 

The Trial

I finished Kafka’s surrealistic, nihilistic, The Trial and wanted a framework to understand it better. Thug Notes did the trick.

 

Reading on Good Friday

 

Happy Birthday, Émile

From the Writers’ Almanac about one of my favorite authors:

Today is the birthday of the French novelist and journalist Émile Zola (books by this author), born in Paris (1840). He invented a new style of fiction writing that he called Naturalism, which he defined as “nature seen through a temperament.” He had been inspired by Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1839), and he decided to try applying scientific principles of observation to the practice of writing fiction. The result was a 20-novel cycle, a kind of fictional documentary about the influence of heredity and environment on an extended family. It was called Les Rougon-Macquart. Some of the novels of the cycle include The Drunkard (1877), Nana (1880), and Germinal (1885).

Zola said, “The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without work.”

And, “If you ask me what I came into this life to do, I will tell you: I came to live out loud.”

 

In Our Time: The Trial

As I’m about to reread Kafka’s The Trial, I found some background information from the BBC’s wonderful programme In Our Time.