Review of The End of August by Yū Miri

Does in 700 pages what can be done in 120 pages.

Ceaseless repetition, much of which is in Korean. Songs and prayers and onomatopoeia constantly invoked. The rhythm reminded me of Ducks, Newburyport, which I hated. -5 stars for abusing the reader’s time and patience. +2 stars for strong descriptions interspersed throughout the book. +2 stars for “going there” for not holding back on rich detail during the scenes of birth, slaughtering a chicken, etc. -3 stars for the glorification of rape. I simply don’t understand why someone being raped would suddenly contract Stockholm Syndrome and begin making love to the rapist, and then do it with him again. +1 star for political messages, veiled by a screen of obscure songs and untranslated Korean, for the author’s internal plight, filtered through her characters, of being an outsider.
The trend these days for “literary” novels is to include snippets that are guaranteed to baffle your reader. Like if one of my characters suddenty says: “na hana hana huhu daga, mato seiohogat seioyuna.” And I don’t explain that this is a catchphrase from the Tibetan monk character from Virtua Fighter 4. This is how random the nonsense in this book seems. “Anheleni demoneki kozhili nodem mnoi.”
Twas Brilig, if you ask me.
The stream of consciousness veered all over the place. The narrator uses running to process her thoughts but her thoughts are too mundane to remember, comment on, or care about.
The confused chronology leads me to believe this novel was cobbled together without regard to structure or flow. That is the fashion nowadays. Just compile 800 pages of notes and force it into the shape of a novel without regard to why things are happening. The reader is expected to feel something from these pithy phrases and characters being ravished and then acting like everything is okay two pages later, and not addressing whatever you just wrote in the last chapter until four hundred pages later. It’s just a huge, obnoxious mess.