Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982

Reviews

'Enthralling and enraging' 'All the more harrowing for the dry manner in which it is told' 'Jiyoung is no raging feminist, rather a passive vessel, which makes her eventual breakdown all the more powerful, while the calm, matter-of-fact prose style adds to the reader’s growing sense of disquiet.' 'I loved this novel. Kim Jiyoung’s life is made to seem at once totally commonplace, and nightmarishly over-the-top. As you read, you constantly feel that revolutionary, electric shift, between commonplace and nightmarish. This kind of imaginative work is so important and so powerful. I hope this book sells a million more copies.' 'After reading Kim Ji-young, Born 1982, I started to think about things in a way I hadn’t thought about them before. It reminded me of the unfair treatment I had experienced being a woman and I felt like I was caught off guard.' 'A book with unique implications; I was so impressed.'  'Written with unbearably clear-sighted perspective, Kim JiYoung, Born 1982 possesses the urgency and immediacy of the scariest horror thriller — except that this is not technically horror, but something closer to reportage. I broke out in a sweat reading this book.'

  'A fierce and powerful look at modern day Korean society through the lens of a refreshingly new protagonist.  Born in 1982, Kim Jiyoung wins us over with her tolerance and strength. She is every one of us who has been invisible.' 'To read the book is to imagine being a restive, aggrieved millennial and to trace her path through everyday misogyny.' ‘An all-too-familiar tale of a smart woman being slowly crushed by constant, inescapable sexism […] beneath the analytical detachment is a rolling rage that compellingly captures Kim Jiyoung’s frustrations’  ‘Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 is a novel of education, in more ways than one. Riffing with the bildungsroman form, Cho has created a heroine who, as her life progresses does not so much develop as unravel. The author’s particular achievement is in blending political and stylistic concerns in a cool tone carefully captured in Jamie Chang’s translation. […] In a culture which places the importance of the category “woman” over that of the individual “person”, we are invited to see Kim Jiyoung’s identity-erasing “insanity” as radical protest. Cho’s moving, witty and powerful novel forces us to face our reality, in which one woman is seen, pretty much, as interchangeable with any other. There’s a logic to Kim Jiyoung’s shape-shifting: she could be anybody’ ‘A ground-breaking work of feminist fiction’ ‘A touchstone for a conversation around feminism and gender […] The character of Kim Jiyoung can be seen as a sort of sacrifice: a protagonist who is broken in order to open up a channel for collective rage. Along with other socially critical narratives to come out of Korea, such as Bong Joon-ho’s Oscar-winning film Parasite, her story could change the bigger one’  ‘A treatise and a howl of anger […] it describes experiences that will be recognisable everywhere. It’s slim, unadorned narrative distils a lifetime’s iniquities into a sharp punch. The books demonstrates the unfairness of the female experience and the sheer difficulty of improving it.’ Expand reviews