Whale by Cheon Myeong-Kwan #1

Chunhui is being introduced to the readers as the female brick maker or as they would celebrate her later: The Red Brick Queen. She was born with 7 kilos and can not speak. Learnt everything about the subject of brickmaking from his stepfather Mun. She was incarcerated when the ‘inferno’ hit and killed 800 people. By the time she was free, she is  27 years old and walking home to the brickyard using only her subconscious as a guide.

Her body morphology is constantly highlighted as brusque, strong and bulky and there seems to be a lot of emphasis on that. As she returns to the by-now abandoned brickyard a near post-apocalyptic picture is drawn to the reader with painstaking detail. So much so that if you are able to descend further down in your imagination you find yourself wrinkling your nose or flinching at the descriptions of odours and scents of the nearly ‘haunted’ brickyard. Black mould and dead animals, maggots swirling in the hot water puddles and to top it off: Chunhui is still in her prison uniform. Barefeeted for nine days and actively and painfully missing a toenail. Yeah. 

As for the book’s dynamics: the reader gets swept into the story straight away without warning, or any explanation. There is no gentle hand-holding or water testing. The reader appears in this vibrant and disturbing world with a narrator who is obsessively focused on peculiar body morphology. I’m curious if this is going to be the main motivation for the rest of the book further along or if it’s going to escalate to something even more twisted.