Kyung-sook Shin

I'm finding it hard to figure out how to describe Violets. If I had to sum it up in one word it would be 'loneliness'.

San is an outsider from the moment she is born, ostracised within her small rural community. With an absent father and unreliable mother, the only solace she finds is in her friendship with another young girl, until one day something happens which destroys the friendship forever. Devastated, San eventually moves to Seoul where she finds some brief happiness working in a flower shop, cultivating the plants and developing a new friendship with the other girl who runs the shop, until a fleeting encounter with a womanising photographer starts her on a crazed, naive obsession which boils up old suppressed emotions to the surface.

It's a sad, dark book which I appreciated more than I can say I fully enjoyed. Shin's protagonist is one of life's overlooked people, who lives on the margins unseen, a person who life is never going to be kind to.

4 stars (upgraded from 3.5 stars originally, but I can't stop thinking about this book now and how cleverly the story is woven).… (more)

Detailed, intimate and beautiful in places, but hoo boy, depressing. I really felt like I was there in Seoul, with the heat and the food, and I loved the descriptions of the flowers in the shop, yet San was a painful character to follow. I know that she is the 'violet' of the title, small and insignificant, but her silences ('...') were painful and why was her 'loneliness' enough to make her put herself in danger like that? Also, without the author's afterword, I never would have guessed that she survived! Short but far from swift, and leaves a bruise.… (more)