Whale: SHORTLISTED FOR THE INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE 2023

Reviews

Kacey Compton

This combined with her intelligence makes her a fantastic entrepreneur and throughout her life she builds various majorly successful businesses from the ground up. A beautiful picture of life in Korea and how their society, and circumstances, changed so drastically over the course of their lives. Chunhui, her daughter, is vastly different from her mother and resembles more her father, built like a house and seemingly of sub-par intelligence. The Whale, which she spots breaching the surface of the wide ocean as she begins this new life, is used symbolically throughout the story to represent her inner strength and constant desire for more, bigger, better.

Their lives are guided by fate, and their futures are entwined with those of an ugly old crone and her one-eyed daughter. Men are not demonized, it is simply that a name is not necessary or important to the furthering of the story. I also got the feeling that being named is the narrators way of showing the most significant and beloved men in their lives.

Unique and absorbing, I would recommend this book to everyone. In Whale, we follow the eventful lives of Geumbok and, later, her daughter Chunhui. I loved this book.

Its hard to say much more without giving away spoilers! The characters are so well formed that they feel real and I found myself genuinely feeling for them, and wanting good things to happen to them.

Geumbok is a beautiful, strong-willed and intelligent woman who escapes from a traumatic childhood of loss, and is hurled into the big wide world. There's a huge emphasis on female strength and power throughout and, while there are some memorable and loveable male characters, many of the men featuring throughout the novel lack even the basic dignity of a name, and instead are referred to as the fishmonger, the lumberjack, the truck driver, and so on.