npr book review pachinko

By Min Jin Lee

‘Pachinko’ by Min Jin Lee is a historical fiction that utilizes a unique plot narrative that resonates with all people in terms of family bond, struggle for survival, and the will to reclaim one’s identity in a strange world.

Article written by Victor Onuorah

Degree in Journalism from University of Nigeria, Nsukka.

Epic and compelling, ‘ Pachinko ’ by Min Jin Lee takes the reader by hand for a mixed ride filled with joy and family bond, pains and sorrow, denial and discrimination accustomed to being in a land far away from, and outside, one’s area of protection.

A Sweeping Tale of Four Generations of a Korean Family

Min Jin Lee’s masterpiece ‘ Pachinko’ follows the story of a poor Korean family down to its fourth generation in what is a mixed ride of love, loss, and struggle to find oneself in a stranger’s land.

Sunja becomes the all-important central character connecting all four generations of a Korean family. She is the beautiful daughter of Hoonie, a man born disabled, who, unlike her three senior siblings, survives and grows into a strong woman and later the matriarch of the Baek family.

She has a tough start to life as Hoonie her father passes away when she turns 13, and by 17 mistakenly becomes pregnant for Koh Hansu, the handsome and rich fish dealer who’s also a dangerous gang member of the ‘Yakuza’. Hansu rejects to marry her making her life a disgrace and a living hell.

Sunja rises through the disappointment to raise her children Noa and Mozasu until they become responsible people in a (foreign) Japanese society that treats non-natives with biases and discrimination. Min Jin Lee uses her experience as an immigrant to tell such a relatable and emotional story in ‘ Pachinko.’

A portrayal of True Family Values, Love, and Survival

For the most part, Min Jin Lee’s ‘ Pachinko ’ is a novel that beautifully exhibits a tremendous amount of true family love, loss, and the gumption for survival that it portrays in a four generational tale of a Korean family.

The reader sees These epic combinations come to play from the start of ‘ Pachinko ’ with Hoonie’s aging parents who are forced to shower their only son, Hoonie – born with disabilities, with love and affection, survival values, and ethics – just the right quantities that he needs to take care of himself is a cruel world for when they are no longer there to protect and provide for him.

Hoonie, despite his disabilities (as he was born with two disorders in cleft palate and clubbed foot), does well to transfer these survivalist values, love, and affection to his miracle child, Sunja – who also transmits the same to her children and grandchildren.

An Emotionally Aggravating Loss to Generational Characters

When it comes to deaths and losses one finds the reader’s emotion is being aggravated on several accounts – thanks to the many instances of emotional deaths of characters each page is made to grapple with.

From Hoonie’s two brothers dying from illness to his aging parents passing away three years after he marries Hoonie himself. Sunja’s three senior siblings down to Baek Isak, Hana, and Yumi die a poetic death so that her son lives, and then there is Noa’s painfully unexpected suicide hitting us just right when he was larger than life and had more reasons to live for.

An Insight Into The History of ‘ Zainichi ’ Koreans

At best, ‘ Pachinko ’ is one of the few books that give the readership a short, yet complete insight into the history of the start of the ‘ Zainichi ’ race that still exists today in Japan.

‘ Zainichi ’, as a Japanese word, roughly translates to mean a new foreigner, and is designated by Japan to non-citizens to remind them that they will never become one of them. They are then met with systemic discrimination, ostracization, and dehumanization.

The reader learns from the book ‘ Pachinko ’ that the history of ‘ Zainichi ’ is traced back to around 1910 when Korea was annexed by Japan.

How much of a good read is Min Jin Lee’s ‘ Pachinko ’?

Min Jin Lee’s ‘ Pachinko ’ is without a doubt a good read and this has been proven by the number of high-profile reviews it’s gotten from top publications and personalities, such as Barack Obama.

How successful was ‘ Pachinko ’ post-publication?

Upon its release, ‘ Pachinko ’ immediately caught the eyes of the literary committee because of its historically insightful storytelling of Asian ethnicity. The book also was runner-up for the 2017’s National Book Award.

Is ‘ Pachinko ’ based on a true historical account?

Min Jin Lee included research for the final draft of ‘ Pachinko ’ by interviewing real-life Koreans who lived in Japan to get their experience and thoughts, however, this doesn’t make the book a true-life account and so is still considered a fiction.

Pachinko Review

Book Title: Pachinko

Book Description: Min Jin Lee's 'Pachinko' is an epic tale of a Korean family's endurance through colonialism, earthquakes, and WWII.

Book Author: Min Jin Lee

Book Edition: First Edition

Book Format: Hardcover

Publisher - Organization: Grand Central Publishing

Date published: February 7, 2017

ISBN: 978-1-4555-6393-7

Number Of Pages: 504

'Pachinko' Review: A Multigenerational Epic on the Racial Feud between Korea and Japan.

‘ Pachinko ‘ by Min Jin Lee is a sweeping four-generational epic based on the survival struggles of a poor Korean family in the midst of social and economic hardship brought upon by colonialism, earthquake, and World War II. The thrills of the story are neverending as it is a joy to the reader. It’s revealing and proves itself an abridged version of an interesting, yet untold history shared by Korea and Japan. With ‘ Pachinko ‘, there are so many life lessons to learn, and some of them are about value for family, others are on survival strategies and approaches to fitting into a strange, far away land outside of the home. The reader doesn’t have to understand the Korean language or be Asian to harvest from the wealth of interesting historical information portrayed in the book by Min Jin Lee.

• An abridged history of the racial feud between Korea and Japan 
• Teaches vital life lessons on survival strategies and family values 
• Easily readable, as stories flow into each other with seamless transitions
• Story is slightly one-sided, leaving out the Japanese accounts
• Too many less significant characters 
• Enormous inclusion of ethnic prejudices and ostracization

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Victor is as much a prolific writer as he is an avid reader. With a degree in Journalism, he goes around scouring literary storehouses and archives; picking up, dusting the dirt off, and leaving clean even the most crooked pieces of literature all with the skill of analysis.

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‘Pachinko’ Review: K-Drama, American-Style

Min Jin Lee’s best-selling novel about the harsh lives of Koreans living in Japan is turned into a glossy family saga for Apple TV+.

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By Mike Hale

In Japan, millions of people are addicted to the pinball-like arcade game pachinko . Around the world, millions more may soon find themselves addicted to a soapy, bittersweet television series called “Pachinko.” Just as pachinko-parlor owners delicately adjust their devices’ pins and cups to keep gamblers in the seats, the makers of “Pachinko” have expertly tweaked the machinery of their story to produce a guaranteed crowd-pleaser.

Premiering Friday on Apple TV+ with three of its eight episodes, the series is based on the 2017 best seller by Min Jin Lee — sometimes faithfully, more often with a tenuous connection, if any, to the book’s events, themes and tone.

Opening with the portentous line “History has failed us, but no matter,” Lee’s novel chronicled the harsh existence of four generations of a Korean family living in a fiercely racist Japan, relegated to poverty and unable, because of discriminatory laws and international politics, to return home. Their fortunes, if not their status, finally begin to change when one of them becomes a pachinko man — a business open to ethnic Koreans because of its unsavory associations.

Lee employed what could be seen as either verities or convenient clichés about Koreans — stubbornness, passion, capacity for hard work, shrewd business instincts — in the service of a substantial melodrama. “Pachinko,” the book, is a page-turner, but its attention to the details of character and period (it takes place over eight decades, beginning in 1910) and its steady, unforced narrative drive give it considerable power. It has the feel of something from the 19th century, like the Victorian novels devoured by one of its characters, the scholarly Noa.

By contrast, “Pachinko” the TV series has a thoroughly contemporary sensibility, and it works overtime to ingratiate itself with all possible viewers. That desire is evident in the opening credits sequence, set to a pop tune, the Grass Roots anthem “Let’s Live for Today” : The central cast members, in their period costumes but out of character, dance among the pachinko machines, sliding and spinning and mugging for the camera. It’s hard to imagine anything more out of tune with Lee’s book.

Of course, the show’s makers — the network- and cable-TV veteran Soo Hugh ( “The Whispers,” “The Terror”), who created it and was the lead writer, and the directors Kogonada and Justin Chon — had no obligation to the book, and their “Pachinko” has its own significant charms. The credits sequence, with its bright but washed-out palette, is pure eye candy, and the show looks great overall, especially in the early episodes directed by Kogonada and shot by Florian Hoffmeister.

The elaborate reproductions of Korean markets and fishing villages from the early 20th century and of the Korean ghetto in prewar Osaka, constructed in South Korea and British Columbia, are both luxuriously picturesque and credibly lived-in. As visually satisfying costume drama, the period sections of “Pachinko” are unimpeachable.

Also impossible to argue with is the excellence of the show’s large, mostly South Korean and Japanese cast. (The dialogue is predominantly Korean and Japanese, subtitled in separate colors.) The main character, the indomitable Sunja, is played with equal grace by the newcomer Minha Kim as a young wife and mother and by the Oscar-winning Yuh-Jung Youn (“Minari”) as a long-suffering matriarch. Another major South Korean star, Lee Minho of the beloved K-drama “Boys Over Flowers,” deploys his charisma in the role of Hansu, Sunja’s lover and, later, her Magwitch-like benefactor.

Here and there — generally in the moments taken most directly from the book — those actors achieve something powerful, like the wrenching scene between Sunja and her mother, Yangjin (Inji Jeong), when Sunja leaves Korea. Too often, though, their work is wrapped in several layers of Hollywood gauze; the subtlety of their performances gets obscured by the general tendency of the production toward tasteful schmaltz.

In some moments this is explicit — note the cooing vocalise and ad-agency camerawork when Yangjin prepares a special goodbye meal of hard-to-find white rice. But it is discernible primarily as an overarching sensibility, and in adjustments that make the characters more conventionally relatable and events more conventionally dramatic than they were on the page.

Hence, the child Sunja (Yu-na Jeon) is now a lovable, precocious moppet, an Annie of the fish market, and her father, Hoonie (Dae Ho Lee), has morphed from stoic and noble to eloquently philosophical. A series of plot changes — including how Sunja and Hansu begin spending time together and how the gentle pastor Isak (Steve Sanghyun Noh) broaches the idea of marriage with Sunja — seem designed to comfort a current viewer who wants a female protagonist to have more agency. But they don’t add anything to the story, whose original point was how little ability Sunja had to direct the course of her life.

(In perhaps another nod to changing sensitivities in the five years since the book came out, one of the central bad guys, who was Japanese in the original, is now white.)

Viewers who have read the book may also be distracted by several structural changes. The story now moves on multiple time tracks, seguing constantly between past and present, and large chunks of story — like an entire episode largely set during the Kanto earthquake of 1923, which led to a massacre of Koreans — have been added. Other significant plot strands from the book don’t appear at all.

These changes mostly reinforce Hollywood-style uplift — the introduction of a glamorous, ill-fated entertainer on the ocean voyage to Japan has strong echoes of “Titanic.” They work toward making the show a traditional, sentimental, inspirational saga. They also have a practical value, because while “Pachinko” is based on a self-contained novel, it is not a mini-series. New material is needed, and material from the book needs to be hoarded for potential future seasons.

The premiere of “Pachinko” follows on the unprecedented success in America of South Korean films and TV dramas like “Parasite” and “Squid Game,” and it has the soap-operatic appeal of a well-made K-drama. But as an adaptation of a popular novel by an Asian-American author, brought to the screen by an Asian-American artist with an ethnically Asian cast, the more apt comparison is to a work from three decades ago: Wayne Wang’s “Joy Luck Club.”

Hollywoodization, voluntary or not, is the operative word when it comes to both “Joy Luck Club” and “Pachinko.” And to the extent that glossy melodrama pulls audiences into a story that puts people we haven’t seen before onscreen, and treats the hatred and injustice they face with some degree of honesty, it’s not a dirty word.

But beneath its shine and its likability, “Pachinko” is pretty ordinary — a lot of hard work has gone into making something easily digestible.

As it happens, the story of Sunja and Isak echoes that of my own maternal grandparents, who left northern Korea in the late 1920s, met and married in Osaka and never went home again. Lee’s “Pachinko,” with its attention to mundane detail and its harsh but not hopeless fatalism, resonated strongly with what I know of their lives. The TV “Pachinko” melted away while I watched it.

Mike Hale is a television critic. He also writes about online video, film and media. He came to The Times in 1995 and worked as an editor in Sports, Arts & Leisure and Weekend Arts before becoming a critic in 2009. More about Mike Hale

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Pachinko review: a masterpiece of empathy, integrity and family loyalty

Min jin lee tells an endearing tale of hardship and inhumanity suffered by koreans.

Min Jin Lee: a writer in complete control of her characters and her story and with an intense awareness of the importance of her heritage.

Earlier this year, I wrote about Yaa Gyasi's debut novel Homegoing in these pages and praised the author's use of time and generational discord to tell a story that combined politics, history and gender with page-turning appeal. The same compliment could be offered to Min Jin Lee, whose novel Pachinko was one of the most popular choices among writers offering their summer reading selections to The Irish Times .

Pachinko tells the story of Korean immigrants living in Japan between 1910 and today, a family saga that explores the effects of poverty, abuse, war, suicide, and the accumulation of wealth on multiple generations. When the novel opens, we are introduced to Hoonie, “born with a cleft palate and a twisted foot”, who enters into an arranged marriage with Yangjin and despite their age difference – he is 28, she is 15 – a mutual respect and affection builds between them, not least because of their shared love for daughter Sunja.

It is Sunja who will prove the most important character in the novel. As a teenager, she is seduced by a yakuza, Koh Hansu, leaving her pregnant and unmarried, but when a sympathetic young missionary asks for her hand, it seems her disgrace will be avoided.

One of the most endearing elements of Pachinko is how honourable most of the characters are. Husbands love their wives, children respect their parents. Even Koh Hansu, who has played fast and loose with the affections of a young girl, spends decades trying to help Sunja, and although she is dismissive of him in later life, their relationship remains one of the most intriguing in the book.

Impoverished circumstances

But for all the love scattered across the pages, there is hatred too. The monstrous degrees of hardship, disrespect and inhumanity suffered by the Koreans makes for painful reading. They live in impoverished circumstances, are paid less than their Japanese counterparts, are spoken to as if they were dogs and, in one powerful scene, are forced to register time and again as strangers in a land in which many of them have in fact been born. Lee writes of this maltreatment with a stoicism that reflects the fortitude of her characters. Surviving is what matters to them, not human rights.

As the generations continue, we are introduced to Sunja’s sons, Noa, studious and intellectual, and Mozasu, passionate but disinterested in education. The choices both boys make in their lives stand in stark contrast to each other but they pursue their goals with equal conviction, albeit with markedly different results. No spoilers, but suffice to say that as the boys’ lives diverge they arrive at opposing fates. Ultimately, the importance of family honour proves so strong that revelations from the past lead to the most heart-breaking tragedy.

Pachinko itself is a Japanese version of pinball and while pachinko parlours become the family business later in the novel, it also stands as a metaphor for the lives they lead. In a game of pinball, the initial strike of the ball against the flipper determines how the game will play out. For Sunja and her descendants, it is what happens at birth that determines their fate. Over the years they may bounce off the sides of the machine, ricocheting against the bumpers, kickers and slingshots, but there is a sense that fate has decided how their lives will develop from the moment the plunger hits the ball.

Generational sweep

While Pachinko is only Min Jin Lee's second novel – her first, Free Food for Millionaires , will be reissued later this summer – it is the work of a writer in complete control of her characters and her story and with an intense awareness of the importance of her heritage. In its generational sweep, it recalls John Galsworthy's The Forsyth Saga , replicating some of that classic novel's focus on status, money, infidelity and cruelty as it explores the effect of parental decisions on children, and the children of children. As Faulkner put it, "the past isn't dead. It isn't even past."

This is a long book but is told with such flair and linguistic dexterity that I found myself unable to put it down. Every year, there are a few standout novels that survive long past the hype has died down and the hyperbolic compliments from friends scattered across the dust jacket have been forgotten. Pachinko , a masterpiece of empathy, integrity and familial loyalty, will be one of those novels.

John Boyne's latest novel is The Heart's Invisible Furies (Doubleday)

John Boyne, a contributor to The Irish Times, is a novelist and critic

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• <em>Pachinko</em> Is a Gorgeous Adaptation of a Literary Masterpiece, Marred by One Baffling Choice

Pachinko Is a Gorgeous Adaptation of a Literary Masterpiece, Marred by One Baffling Choice

W hen Japan annexed Korea in 1910, the occupation was more than just a political reality. As Korean resistance met with ever harsher responses from the colonial government, Japanese leaders took aim at the culture itself. A strategy of forced assimilation meant the destruction of cherished art, historical documents, and buildings dating back centuries. Koreans saw their language, religion, commerce, agricultural industry, and news media supplanted by the invaders’ institutions; they even had to adopt Japanese names. Meanwhile, with scarce employment prospects in their homeland, hundreds of thousands of Koreans had little choice but to relocate to Japan, where they were mostly relegated to menial jobs and faced brutal discrimination.

This atrocity, whose impact on the Korean people still reverberates in the present, forms the backdrop of Min Jin Lee ’s magnificent 2017 novel Pachinko . The rare National Book Award finalist that is also a bestseller, populated by rich characters and suffused with emotion, Lee’s story comes to television with a lavish adaptation premiering March 25 on Apple TV+. By all accounts, it was not easy bringing this epic, multigenerational, multilingual saga of immigration and family to the small screen. Creator Soo Hugh ( The Whispers ), working with filmmakers Kogonada ( After Yang , Columbus ) and actor turned director Justin Chon, as well as a uniformly excellent ensemble cast, beautifully conveys the sweep and spirit of the novel. The only major misstep is a structural choice that undermines Lee’s carefully paced storytelling.

Spanning most of the 20th century, Pachinko opens in the woods of rural, Japanese-occupied Korea in 1915. Yangjin—a young woman born into poverty, married to the cleft-lipped son of a family that owns a boarding house and reeling from the deaths of three consecutive infant sons—has come to secure a blessing for her fourth pregnancy. “There is a curse in my blood,” Yangjin (Inji Jeong) tells the female shaman. Then the action jumps three-quarters of a century and halfway around the world, to New York in 1989. An ambitious young finance guy, Solomon (Jin Ha), strides confidently into a meeting with a pair of white, male superiors, who unceremoniously inform him that he’s not getting a promotion they all know he’s earned.

When we meet Yangjin, she’s just months away from giving birth to the show’s heroine, Sunja, whose life will be shaped by what she endures during the occupation. Solomon is Sunja’s grandson. And this eight-episode first season (of four that Hugh hopes to make) patiently fills in the intervening decades, though not with the simplistic tale of immigrant bootstrapping that newcomers to Lee’s story might expect. In one of the two parallel narratives, set in the ’30s, a teenage Sunja (played with grace, vulnerability, and grit by Minha Kim) becomes entangled with a Korean businessman, Koh Hansu (South Korean megastar Lee Min-Ho), whose flexible morals have helped him prosper in Japan. Their romance catalyzes her departure for Osaka—although, again, not for the reason you might assume. The other core story line follows Solomon’s return to Osaka, where his family still lives, with a plan to prove he’s worthy of a VP title by facilitating a crucial deal that only an employee of Korean heritage could possibly close.

There is a symmetry to this structure, one that magnifies some of Pachinko ’s most salient themes. Even though they’re poor in the ’30s and relatively rich in the ’80s, the family is constantly forced, in both eras, to choose between impossible binaries: money and integrity, safety and authenticity, assimilation and persecution. But it’s not exactly difficult to glean these ideas from Lee’s chronological structure, which I greatly prefer. There’s a trend toward multiple timelines in TV these days; complicated storytelling has become the marker of prestige drama—of television as art. Yet Pachinko was art long before it was TV. The bifurcated narrative only adds too many transitions that disrupt the series’ emotional throughline and sows confusion around characters that turn up episodes before they’re properly introduced. Readers eager to see the book’s absorbing middle chapters onscreen will have to cross their fingers for a renewal.

Such a big miscalculation might sink a weaker show, but in every other sense, Pachinko —like its heroine—is too singular and alive to fail. As portrayed by Kim in her youth and Minari Oscar winner Youn Yuh-jung in older age, Sunja epitomizes immigrant persistence without devolving into a stock character. Hugh avoids reducing her to either a martyr or a plucky success story. It was a wise choice, and one that has only become possible in the streaming era, to mix Korean, Japanese, and English dialogue; color-coded subtitles efficiently convey how characters combine tongues and code-switch. The art direction surpasses that of TV’s most immersive historical dramas, including The Crown . Complementing this intricate mise-en-scène and the cast’s fiercely physical performances is cinematography that lingers on textural details: the hem of a wedding dress, the pudgy foot of a newborn, the snowy brilliance of Korean white rice.

Yes, this adaptation is less than perfect; the disservice it does to the structural integrity of a novel that gains momentum and poignancy as the decades progress shouldn’t be understated. The overall impression is of an epochal masterpiece cut into snippets and reassembled out of order. That’s frustrating. Even when you account for its shortcomings, though, TV’s Pachinko remains the rare show of both artistic and historic import. Everyone should see it. But maybe read the book first.

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Awards & Accolades

Our Verdict

Kirkus Reviews' Best Books Of 2017

National Book Award Finalist

by Min Jin Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 7, 2017

An old-fashioned epic whose simple, captivating storytelling delivers both wisdom and truth.

An absorbing saga of 20th-century Korean experience, seen through the fate of four generations.

Lee ( Free Food for Millionaires , 2007) built her debut novel around families of Korean-Americans living in New York. In her second novel, she traces the Korean diaspora back to the time of Japan’s annexation of Korea in 1910. “History has failed us,” she writes in the opening line of the current epic, “but no matter.” She begins her tale in a village in Busan with an aging fisherman and his wife whose son is born with a cleft palate and a twisted foot. Nonetheless, he is matched with a fine wife, and the two of them run the boardinghouse he inherits from his parents. After many losses, the couple cherishes their smart, hardworking daughter, Sunja. When Sunja gets pregnant after a dalliance with a persistent, wealthy married man, one of their boarders—a sickly but handsome and deeply kind pastor—offers to marry her and take her away with him to Japan. There, she meets his brother and sister-in-law, a woman lovely in face and spirit, full of entrepreneurial ambition that she and Sunja will realize together as they support the family with kimchi and candy operations through war and hard times. Sunja’s first son becomes a brilliant scholar; her second ends up making a fortune running parlors for pachinko, a pinball-like game played for money. Meanwhile, her first son’s real father, the married rich guy, is never far from the scene, a source of both invaluable help and heartbreaking woe. As the destinies of Sunja’s children and grandchildren unfold, love, luck, and talent combine with cruelty and random misfortune in a deeply compelling story, with the troubles of ethnic Koreans living in Japan never far from view.

Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2017

ISBN: 978-1-4555-6393-7

Page Count: 496

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Review Posted Online: Sept. 25, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2016

LITERARY FICTION

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HOUSE OF LEAVES

by Mark Z. Danielewski ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 6, 2000

The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...

An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.

Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad.  The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized).  As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest ) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses).  Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture.  Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."

Pub Date: March 6, 2000

ISBN: 0-375-70376-4

Page Count: 704

Publisher: Pantheon

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000

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NORMAL PEOPLE

by Sally Rooney ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 16, 2019

Absolutely enthralling. Read it.

A young Irish couple gets together, splits up, gets together, splits up—sorry, can't tell you how it ends!

Irish writer Rooney has made a trans-Atlantic splash since publishing her first novel, Conversations With Friends , in 2017. Her second has already won the Costa Novel Award, among other honors, since it was published in Ireland and Britain last year. In outline it's a simple story, but Rooney tells it with bravura intelligence, wit, and delicacy. Connell Waldron and Marianne Sheridan are classmates in the small Irish town of Carricklea, where his mother works for her family as a cleaner. It's 2011, after the financial crisis, which hovers around the edges of the book like a ghost. Connell is popular in school, good at soccer, and nice; Marianne is strange and friendless. They're the smartest kids in their class, and they forge an intimacy when Connell picks his mother up from Marianne's house. Soon they're having sex, but Connell doesn't want anyone to know and Marianne doesn't mind; either she really doesn't care, or it's all she thinks she deserves. Or both. Though one time when she's forced into a social situation with some of their classmates, she briefly fantasizes about what would happen if she revealed their connection: "How much terrifying and bewildering status would accrue to her in this one moment, how destabilising it would be, how destructive." When they both move to Dublin for Trinity College, their positions are swapped: Marianne now seems electric and in-demand while Connell feels adrift in this unfamiliar environment. Rooney's genius lies in her ability to track her characters' subtle shifts in power, both within themselves and in relation to each other, and the ways they do and don't know each other; they both feel most like themselves when they're together, but they still have disastrous failures of communication. "Sorry about last night," Marianne says to Connell in February 2012. Then Rooney elaborates: "She tries to pronounce this in a way that communicates several things: apology, painful embarrassment, some additional pained embarrassment that serves to ironise and dilute the painful kind, a sense that she knows she will be forgiven or is already, a desire not to 'make a big deal.' " Then: "Forget about it, he says." Rooney precisely articulates everything that's going on below the surface; there's humor and insight here as well as the pleasure of getting to know two prickly, complicated people as they try to figure out who they are and who they want to become.

Pub Date: April 16, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-984-82217-8

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Hogarth

Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019

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by Sally Rooney

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Pachinko (National Book Award Finalist) Hardcover – February 7, 2017

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• Print length 496 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Grand Central Publishing
• Publication date February 7, 2017
• Dimensions 6.45 x 1.9 x 9.3 inches
• ISBN-10 1455563935
• ISBN-13 978-1455563937
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Amazon.com review.

An Amazon Best Book of February 2017: Beginning in 1910 during the time of Japanese colonialization and ending many decades later in 1989, Pachinko is the epic saga of a Korean family told over four generations. The family’s story starts with Hoonie, a young Korean man born with physical deformities, but whose destiny comes from his inner strength and kindness. Hoonie’s daughter, rather than bring shame on her family, leaves their homeland for Japan, where her children and grandchildren will be born and raised; yet prejudice against their Korean heritage will prevent them from ever feeling at home. In Pachinko , Min Jin Lee says much about success and suffering, prejudice and tradition, but the novel never bogs down and only becomes richer, like a sauce left simmering hour after hour. Lee’s exceptional story of one family is the story of many of the world’s people. They ask only for the chance to belong somewhere—and to be judged by their hearts and actions rather than by ideas of blood traits and bad seeds. --Seira Wilson, The Amazon Book Review

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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Grand Central Publishing; First Edition (February 7, 2017)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 496 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1455563935
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1455563937
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.31 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.45 x 1.9 x 9.3 inches
• #135 in Asian American Literature & Fiction
• #216 in Cultural Heritage Fiction
• #3,031 in Literary Fiction (Books)

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Customer Review: Brilliantly written and thought provoking

Vivek Sanan

Pachinko (National Book Award Finalist)

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About the author

Min jin lee.

Min Jin Lee is a recipient of fiction fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study at Harvard. Her second novel Pachinko (2017) was a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction, runner-up for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, winner of the Medici Book Club Prize, and a New York Times 10 Best Books of 2017. A New York Times Bestseller, Pachinko was also a Top 10 Books of the Year for BBC, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and the New York Public Library. Pachinko was a selection for “Now Read This,” the joint book club of PBS NewsHour and The New York Times. It was on over 75 best books of the year lists, including NPR, PBS, and CNN. Pachinko will be translated into 25 languages. Lee’s debut novel Free Food for Millionaires (2007) was a Top 10 Books of the Year for The Times of London, NPR’s Fresh Air, USA Today, and a national bestseller. Her writings have appeared in The New Yorker, NPR’s Selected Shorts, One Story, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, The Times Literary Supplement, The Guardian, Conde Nast Traveler, The Times of London, and Wall Street Journal. She served three consecutive seasons as a Morning Forum columnist of the Chosun Ilbo of South Korea. In 2018, Lee was named as an Adweek Creative 100 for being one of the “10 Writers and Editors Who are Changing the National Conversation” and a Frederick Douglass 200. She received an honorary degree of Doctor of Humane Letters from Monmouth College. She will be a Writer-in-Residence at Amherst College from 2019-2022.

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Claire Messud's latest novel is a multigenerational saga inspired by real events

• Carol Iaciofano Aucoin

In the prologue to “ This Strange Eventful History ,” Claire Messud’s outstanding multigenerational saga, an unnamed narrator considers how to share the story of her family. She concludes that “It doesn’t matter where I start. We’re always in the middle; wherever we stand, we see only partially.”

And then she has another insight: “I could begin, of course, with the aloneness.”

Over the span of 70 years, from 1940 to 2010, “This Strange Eventful History” tells the often-heartbreaking tale of three generations of the Cassar family: Gaston and Lucienne; their son and daughter-in-law, François and Barbara, their daughter Denise, and their granddaughter Chloe.

The story opens at a fraught historical moment, when Nazi Germany is on the verge of invading France. Gaston, the naval attaché to the French consulate in Greece, has sent his family to Algiers to be far from Europe’s battlegrounds. Algiers is Gaston and Lucienne’s homeland, and where their extended family resides. It is an entirely new country to François and Denise, who are 8 and 6 years old, respectively.

This will be the first of many moves. Over the course of the next seven decades, the Cassars will attend elite colleges, attain high-powered jobs, and raise children in many parts of the world, including Massachusetts, England, South America, Australia and France. Yet, as an adult in the 1990s, Chloe is left with the feeling that she and her family had “lived many places and belonged nowhere.”

In an interview with Vanity Fair in April, Messud — the award-winning author of six works of fiction, including “The Woman Upstairs” and “The Burning Girl” — said that the idea for the novel emerged from reading her grandfather’s letters to his children, in which he chronicled their family’s story. “This Strange Eventful History” is based on some real-life events in Messud’s own family, including how, over three generations, they had shed their foundational French Catholic identity for the more diffuse one of Protestant American, with all the enormous cultural adaptation this implies.

Messud currently lives in Cambridge and teaches fiction at Harvard University. Like Gaston and Lucienne, Messud’s father was originally from French Algeria, and she grew up in some of the locales that are key settings for this tale, including Australia and Canada.

“This Strange Eventful History” is richly textured with a diverse highlight reel of the 20th century: French and Algerian politics, Cuban night life in the early 1950s, the global impact of the aluminum and steel industries. Because Messud ties background facts directly to how they alter the path of a character’s life, or what they reveal about a character, the details always move the story forward, never weigh it down.

But perhaps the most striking aspect of this novel is how Messud conveys loneliness in its many forms. There is an apartness within each of these characters even as they are tightly knotted to each other’s lives.

The wartime disruptions force François to grow up too fast, transforming him from adventurous boy to emotionally isolated man. Even as he accrues academic honors and later attains business success to forge a comfortable life for him and his family, he is unable to fully absorb joyful events.

Loneliness also shows up in Denise’s disconnectedness from the world (a needy child, she grows up to be an insecure adult more comfortable in imagined romances than real ones) and in Barbara’s aloofness toward her husband and daughters. In an ambitious book where the characters both reflect their times and also contain surprising layers of emotion, Barbara is the sole character who is merely a societal mirror: she marries young in the 1950s; transforms herself from housewife to lawyer in the 1970s; feels perpetually constrained by family demands.

Only Gaston and Lucienne shared an abiding romantic happiness, bolstered by the deep Catholic faith that offers a mainstay through their many relocations around the globe for Gaston’s career. And yet, Gaston’s love for Lucienne, who is 15 years older than him, bears an uneasy, overprotective quality that is inexplicable — for most of the story.

To build this expansive tale, Messud created seven sections, with each section focusing on just one year per decade, and chapters for that year told in rotating points of view. The choice to jump forward to particular years creates distinctive tales within the overall tale, whose details resonate more than a more traditional linear chronicle might. For example, one section takes place in 1953, when François is an undergrad at Amherst College, and the next starts in 1962 when he is a husband and father. Background gaps are seamlessly filled in by illuminating dialogue or by a character’s inner musings.

Some chapters can read almost as scenes from a play, like the exquisitely crafted one set in Connecticut, 1989: François and Barbara are now 30-some years into a marriage riddled with coldness and indifference. In this telling episode, François busies himself at home but is agitated over a financial scandal at his company. When Barbara returns from a meeting, their conversation bristles with the tension of partners who can feel a familiar fight bubbling to the surface, but are so emotionally weary they cautiously edge away from confrontation toward another composed but closed-off night. During it all, Messud gradually reveals events that led them here, and how François and Barbara will always know the outlines of each other’s behavior more than they’ll ever know the depth of each other’s heart.

There are many note-perfect scenes like this throughout this masterfully written novel.

The cover of “This Strange Eventful History” displays bold red French passport stamps against a misty blue and white landscape. Only after a moment do you notice, partially in frame, the hazy figure of an urbane-looking man lighting a cigarette. It’s an arresting design, for what you initially see, and what ultimately comes into focus.

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Carol Iaciofano Aucoin Book Critic Carol Iaciofano Aucoin has contributed book reviews, essays and poetry to publications including The ARTery, the Boston Globe and Calyx.

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Pachinko (National Book Award Finalist)

Contributors

By Min Jin Lee

Formats and Prices

• Hardcover (Large Print)
• Audiobook Download (Unabridged)
• Trade Paperback
• Audiobook CD (Unabridged)
• ebook $11.99 $15.99 CAD
• Hardcover (Large Print) $54.00 $69.00 CAD
• Hardcover $29.00 $37.00 CAD
• Trade Paperback $19.99 $25.99 CAD
• Audiobook CD (Unabridged) $35.00 $45.50 CAD

This item is a preorder. Your payment method will be charged immediately, and the product is expected to ship on or around February 7, 2017. This date is subject to change due to shipping delays beyond our control.

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Description

• Asian American
• One of Buzzfeed's "32 Most Exciting Books Coming In 2017" Included in The Millions' "Most Anticipated: The Great 2017 Book Preview" One of Elle 's "25 Most Anticipated Books by Women for 2017" BBC: "Ten Books to Read in 2017" One of BookRiot's "Most Anticipated Books of 2017" One of Nylon's "50 Books We Can't Wait To Read In 2017" One of Entertainment Weekly's Best New Books One of BookBub's 22 Most Anticipated Book Club Reads of 2017
• "Stunning... Despite the compelling sweep of time and history, it is the characters and their tumultuous lives that propel the narrative... A compassionate, clear gaze at the chaotic landscape of life itself. In this haunting epic tale, no one story seems too minor to be briefly illuminated. Lee suggests that behind the facades of wildly different people lie countless private desires, hopes and miseries, if we have the patience and compassion to look and listen." The New York Times Book Review
• "In 1930s Korea, an earnest young woman, abandoned by the lover who has gotten her pregnant, enters into a marriage of convenience that will take her to a new life in Japan. Thus begins Lee's luminous new novel PACHINKO--a powerful meditation on what immigrants sacrifice to achieve a home in the world. PACHINKO confirms Lee's place among our finest novelists." Junot Díaz, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and This Is How You Lose Her
• "A deep, broad, addictive history of a Korean family in Japan enduring and prospering through the 20th century." David Mitchell, Guardian, New York Times bestselling author of The Bone Clocks
• "Astounding. The sweep of Dickens and Tolstoy applied to a 20th century Korean family in Japan. Min Jin Lee's PACHINKO tackles all the stuff most good novels do - family, love, cabbage - but it also asks questions that have never been more timely. What does it mean to be part of a nation? And what can one do to escape its tight, painful, familiar bonds?" Gary Shteyngart, New York Times bestselling author of Little Failure and Super Sad True Love Story
• "Both for those who love Korea, as well as for those who know no more than Hyundai, Samsung and kimchi , this extraordinary book will prove a revelation of joy and heartbreak. I could not stop turning the pages, and wished this most poignant of sagas would never end. Min Jin Lee displays a tenderness and wisdom ideally matched to an unforgettable tale that she relates just perfectly." Simon Winchester, New York Times bestselling author of The Professor and the Madman and Korea: A Walk through the Land of Miracles
• "PACHINKO is elegant and soulful, both intimate and sweeping. This story of several generations of one Korean family in Japan is the story of every family whose parents sacrificed for their children, every family whose children were unable to recognize the cost, but it's also the story of a specific cultural struggle in a riveting time and place. Min Jin Lee has written a big, beautiful book filled with characters I rooted for and cared about and remembered after I'd read the final page." Kate Christensen, Pen/Faulkner-winning author of The Great Man and Blue Plate Special
• "An exquisite, haunting epic...'moments of shimmering beauty and some glory, too,' illuminate the narrative...Lee's profound novel...is shaped by impeccable research, meticulous plotting, and empathic perception." Booklist (starred review)
• "PACHINKO by Min Jin Lee is a great book, a passionate story, a novel of magisterial sweep. It's also fiendishly readable-the real-deal. An instant classic, a quick page-turner, and probably the best book of the year." Darin Strauss, National Book Critics Circle Award-winning author of Half a Life: A Memoir
• "The breadth and depth of challenges come through clearly, without sensationalization. The sporadic victories are oases of sweetness, without being saccharine. Lee makes it impossible not to develop tender feelings towards her characters--all of them, even the most morally compromised. Their multifaceted engagements with identity, family, vocation, racism, and class are guaranteed to provide your most affecting sobfest of the year." BookRiot, "Most Anticipated Books of 2017"
• "An absorbing saga of 20th-century Korean experience... the destinies of Sunja's children and grandchildren unfold, love, luck, and talent combine with cruelty and random misfortune in a deeply compelling story, with the trouble of ethnic Koreans living in Japan never far from view. An old-fashioned epic whose simple, captivating storytelling delivers both wisdom and truth." Kirkus (Starred Review)
• "A sprawling and immersive historical work... Reckoning with one determined, wounded family's place in history, Lee's novel is an exquisite meditation on the generational nature of truly forging a home." Publishers Weekly
• "If proof were needed that one family's story can be the story of the whole world, then PACHINKO offers that proof. Min Jin Lee's novel is gripping from start to finish, crossing cultures and generations with breathtaking power. PACHINKO is a stunning achievement, full of heart, full of grace, full of truth." Erica Wagner, author of Ariel's Gift and Seizure
• "A beautifully crafted story of love, loss, determination, luck, and perseverance...Lee's skillful development of her characters and story lines will draw readers into the work. Those who enjoy historical fiction with strong characterizations will not be disappointed as they ride along on the emotional journeys offered in the author's latest page-turner." Library Journal (starred review)
• "Brilliant, subtle...gripping...What drives this novel is the magisterial force of Lee's characterization...As heartbreaking as it is compelling, PACHINKO is a timely meditation on all that matters to humanity in an age of mass migration and uncertainty." South China Morning Post Magazine
• "Everything I want in a family saga novel, a deep dive immersion into a complete world full of rich and complex lives to follow as they tumble towards fate and fortune...PACHINKO will break your heart in all the right ways." Vela Magazine
• "Gorgeous." Nylon.com, "50 Books We Can't Wait To Read In 2017"
• "Expansive, elegant and utterly absorbing...Combining the detail of a documentary with the empathy of the best fiction, it's a sheer delight." The Daily Mail
• "Deftly brings its large ensemble of characters alive." The Financial Times
• "A social novel in the Dickensian vein...frequently heartbreaking." USA Today
• "Spanning nearly 100 years and moving from Korea at the start of the 20th century to pre- and postwar Osaka and, finally, Tokyo and Yokohama, the novel reads like a long, intimate hymn to the struggles of people in a foreign land...Much of the novel's authority is derived from its weight of research, which brings to life everything from the fishing village on the coast of the East Sea in early 20th-century Korea to the sights and smells of the shabby Korean township of Ikaino in Osaka - the intimate, humanising details of a people striving to carve out a place for themselves in the world. Vivid and immersive, Pachinko is a rich tribute to a people that history seems intent on erasing." The Guardian (UK)
• "Min Jin Lee has produced a beautifully realized saga of an immigrant family in a largely hostile land, trying to establish its own way of belonging." The Times Literary Supplement
• "Lee's sweeping four-generation saga of a Korean family is an extraordinary epic, both sturdily constructed and beautiful." The San Francisco Chronicle
• " Pachinko is a rich, well-crafted book as well as a page turner. Its greatest strength in this regard lies in Lee's ability to shift suddenly between perspectives. We never linger too long with a single character, constantly refreshing our point of view, giving the narrative dimension and depth. Add to that her eye and the prose that captures setting so well, and it would not be surprising to see Pachinko on a great many summer reading lists." Asian Review of Books
• "A sweeping, multigenerational saga about one Korean family making its way in Japan. The immigrant issues resonate; the story captivates." People
• "A culturally rich, psychologically astute family saga." The Washington Post
• "[An] addictive family saga packed with forbidden love, the search for belonging, and triumph against the odds." Esquire, "Top 10 Best Books of 2017 (So Far)"
• "An intimate yet expansive immigrant story." The Michigan Daily
• "The seminal English literary work of the Korean immigrant story in Japan...Lee's sentences and the novel's plotting feel seamless, so much so, that one wonders why we make such a fuss about writing at all. Her style is literary without calling attention to its lyricism." Ploughshares
• "Effortlessly carries the reader through generations, outlining its changing historical context without sacrificing the juicy details...Life is dynamic: in Pachinko , it carries on, rich and wondrous." The Winnipeg Free Press
• "The beautiful, overwhelming tone of the novel - and the one that will stay with you at the end - is one of hope, courage, and survival against all the odds." The Iklkely Gazette UK
• "An exquisite, haunting epic." The Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center & Bloom Magazine
• "As an examination of immigration over generations, in its depth and empathy, Pachinko is peerless." The Japan Times
• "Lee shines in highlighting the complexities of being an immigrant and striving for a better life when resigned to a second-class status. In particular, she explores the mechanisms of internalized oppression and the fraught position of being a "well-behaved" member of a maligned group. When history has failed, and the game is rigged, what's left? Throughout Pachinko , it's acts of kindness and love. The slow accumulation of those moments create a home to return to again and again, even in the worst of times." Paste Magazine
• "This is honest writing, fiction that looks squarely at what is, both terrible and wonderful and occasionally as bracing as a jar of Sunja's best kimchi." NPR Book Review
• "Lee is a master plotter, but the larger issues of class, religion, outsider history and culture she addresses in Pachinko make this a tour de force you'll think about long after you finish reading." National Book Review
• " Pachinko gives us a moving and detailed portrait about what it's like to sit at the nexus of two cultures, and what it means to forge a home in a place that doesn't always welcome you." Fusion
• "If you want a book that challenges and expands your perspective, turn to Pachinko ...in Lee's deft hands, the pages pass as effortlessly as time." BookPage
• "A big novel to lose yourself in or to find yourself anew-a saga of Koreans living in Japan, rejected by the country they call home, unable to return to Korea as wars and strife tear the region apart. The result is like a secret history of both countries burst open in one novel. I hope you love it like I did." Alexander Chee, author of Queen of the Night and Edinburgh writing for the Book of the Month Club
• "Sweeping and powerful" The Toronto Star
• "[An] immersive novel." BBC.com's "10 Books to Read in 2017
• "This family saga about a Korean family living in Japan sticks with you long after you've finished the 496th. I didn't want it to end." Reading Women
• "A sprawling, beautiful novel." PBS

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Beautifully acted 'Shardlake' brings 500-year-old Tudor intrigue into the present day

John Powers

Arthur Hughes plays the title character in Hulu's four-part series, Shardlake . Martin Mlaka/Hulu hide caption

Arthur Hughes plays the title character in Hulu's four-part series, Shardlake .

We live in discordant times, which may be why the turbulent reign of King Henry VIII has enjoyed a revival over the last few years. We've had the gleefully trashy TV series The Tudors , the Tony-winning Broadway musical Six and – at the high end of achievement – Hilary Mantel 's trilogy about Henry's right-hand-man Thomas Cromwell.

Now comes the new Hulu mystery series Shardlake, based on C.J. Sansom's first novel in a series about a crime-solving lawyer in 16th-century England. As a rule, I hate historical mysteries and I feared that Shardlake would serve up the Tudor era's usual cavalcade of castles, codpieces, clopping horses and quasi-Shakespearean lingo – "Prithee, stop, sirrah!" But to my surprise this odd, beautifully acted show pulled me in.

NPR's Book of the Day

Hilary mantel's 'wolf hall' examines the reign of king henry viii through his advisor.

Arthur Hughes stars as Matthew Shardlake, a bitingly intense London barrister known for his brains and for the curved spine that leads the world to undervalue him. One who sees his value is the king's minister Thomas Cromwell – played by a domineering Sean Bean – a dangerous man who's busy stripping the assets of the Catholic church and claiming them for the Crown.

As the action begins, Cromwell has just had his envoy murdered in a coastal monastery. He sends Shardlake to find the killer and, in the process, to find evidence of monkish malfeasance that will justify seizing the monastery's holdings. To keep Shardlake on his toes, he sends along one of his henchmen, brash, impulsive Jack Barak. That's Anthony Boyle, who plays John Wilkes Booth in the current series Manhunt .

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Because the monastery is filled with Catholic monks who hate the Protestant king, things are tricky there from the get-go. Not only do Shardlake and Jack keep being lied to, but the murders are just beginning. As they investigate, they both grow smitten with a servant – played by Ruby Ashbourne Serkis – and they start to develop one of those classic detective story partnerships between a brilliant misfit and an earthier, ordinary guy.

Now, I don't want to oversell Shardlake . As a historical show, it lacks the sweeping grandeur of Shogun , another period drama that reminds us that Protestants and Catholics were once at each other's throats. Nor does it approach Mantel's richly vibrant vision of Henry VIII's England, with its divisions and hatreds and social climbing.

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Yet it has a strong historical atmosphere, especially in showing how Shardlake and Jack find themselves squeezed by powerful forces around them. Both believe they're doing the right thing in helping Cromwell seize Catholic wealth, thinking it should go to England's countless poor people. At the same time, they come to realize that, in Cromwell, they're working for an utterly ruthless politician, one who may have played a key role in setting up Anne Boleyn, whose beheading figures into the plot here.

The show's finest moments lie in the byplay between its lead actors, played by two of Britain's rising stars. As the cocky Jack – a lad risen from the streets and terrified of sinking back – Boyle deftly straddles the line between likable and not. You see why he's been cast to star as a charismatic IRA leader in the upcoming TV adaptation of Patrick Radden Keefe 's book Say Nothing .

Jack's extroversion pairs nicely with the tightly wound Shardlake, whose smile is almost a wince. Hughes was the first actor with a disability to ever play Richard III for the Royal Shakespeare Company – he was born radial dysplasia affecting his right arm – and he doubtless understands Shardlake's pride in the face of what some consider his physical imperfection. "I'm known for my gait," Shardlake says. "It is I, and I embrace it."

Such self-assertion is profoundly modern, and for all its Tudor trappings, Shardlake is filled with present day resonances – not least in its portrait of Cromwell who claims to speak for the people but actually works on behalf of the elite. "The truth must be what we want it to be," Cromwell declares, and though Shardlake knows this is un -true, he also knows that saying so can get a man killed.