Violets by Shin Kyung-sook
Review of Violets by Shin Kyung-sook
“Violator: Noun, one who breaks rules, invades, insults, rapes
Violence: Noun, a disturbance, disruption, destruction
Violet: Noun, a plant, a swallow flower... purple, the color, also used to describe… an oversensitive person, a shy person (“shrinking violet”)
Violin: Noun, a musical instrument... a player of, a violinist”
Violets by Shin Kyung-sook, translated by Anton Hur. Published by Feminist Press (2022).
I have been meaning to pick up a copy of this book for a while now, but didn’t want to commit to a brand new paperback from Feminist Press, although I do love the American publisher of this book.
I have been a very big fan of the work that the Feminist Press puts out, and, although I have not liked some of Shin’s other novels as much as other people, I saw the premise of this book and was very fascinated. I also am quite the Anton Hur fan, I will admit, so that played a factor into this as well.
Something that interests me about Shin’s work is that she puts women in very pivotal moments in Korean culture and history, something that often is missing from the overarching narrative.
Whether it’s The Court Dancer or simply the second-person perspective used in Please Look After Mom, I can see why her work has become so popular in translation. Violets actually is a novel that came out all the way in 2001, over twenty years ago, but the Western world is only getting the chance to see it now.
Let us begin this review!
A young woman born in rural 1970s Korea moves to Seoul and begins to work at a flower shop.
Our main character in Violets is San, who was born in a village where minari grows rampant. We see how her father took off when she was a daughter, bringing in a new wife and starting a life with other kids, and her grandmother kicks her mother and her out of the house, so her mother relocates the two of them to Suwon.
San’s life is not a happy one when it comes to her childhood, as her mother is not really around to take care of her, so, when she comes of age and is in her senior year of high school, San runs away to live in Seoul. There’s one pivotal experience, though, mentioned at the beginning: she kisses her female friend, who then banishes San away from her life after forcing her to cut the head off of a chicken.
When San leaves her job at a hair salon due to abuse from her coworker, she stumbles upon a flower shop near Gwanghwamun Gate that is looking for a new employee to take care of the flowers.
The mute man working that day, who is the shop’s owner that comes from the farm every so often, hires her, and she meets her actual boss, Su-rae, eventually. Su-rae ends up moving in with San, as San’s landlord is threatening to increase the rent, and suddenly San’s life is full of more luxurious items that she has never had before, like visiting cafes or being able to afford new things.
Two seedy men eventually appear into the picture of San’s life, and she does try to use them to try and get over the memory of her friend that she kissed one day as a child.
That’s like a mountain she cannot get over in her life, constantly going back to it and she is reminded through the letters she has received from her mother. It becomes a slippery story as we delve deeper into the slow burn of San’s world, as she has the resources to slowly climb her way out of her situation, but then she seems more comfortable reminiscing in what she could have had versus what she has now.
Something I found to be an interesting metaphor—one that may not exist, who knows—was that when San returns to her home village at the end of the novel, looking for her old friend, the friend’s aunt says that the girl became a nun. I found that path divergence to be a curious one, as San is lost in life and the friend, too, seems lost from that initial moment when they kissed onwards.
Perhaps she became a nun to suppress desire, while San is literally the one who got away from all of this. While the friend is a nun, San is desperately seeking out the attention of men by the end of the novel, which leads to a form of damnation (there is an alluded fact that she may have been raped) and then a physical violence as she is torn up by a machine.
Wherever San goes to escape cruelty, whether it is her home village or the city of Seoul, it just seems to follow wherever she goes). And that is the tragedy of Violets: she is a small figure in this world. It is only the nineties in Seoul, although there are familiar relics such as the Paris Baguettes and the cafes you can see across the city today, and she is a young drifter wandering from life’s problems.
Although her relationship with Su-rae, her boss, is fairly good, San has no one in this world. And maybe that is why she runs away at the end: she does not know how to exist outside a space of mental health issues.
There’s also a warning agains the men in this story. Some, like the old farmer who lives on the traditional plot of land that he inherited from his family, are kind and offer opportunity.
Others, like the photographer and Choi, only want women for their bodies. Violets is a very good book that ends too soon and very abruptly—that ending is what threw off an entire star and a half for me. I was comfortable in the world that Shin immerses us in and then she throws us a massive curveball at the end, making it something that may leave a bad taste in your mouth.
Overall Thoughts
I think it’s a good, beautiful book. There are a lot of images in here that are genuinely beautiful and make the story come alive for me. Even though this is one of Shin’s earlier works, it’s still good.
There’s a lot of substance and things to think about when it comes to San’s situation, even if most readers may not like her as a character because she’s so trapped in the “woe is me” narrative. This is a story that absolutely seeps with loneliness in the writing style—the sentences and images depicted really do separate San from the rest of the world, making her an isolating figure that the viewer spectates on from a distance.
It is an important subject at the end of the day, especially considering this was published in 2001.
