Review: 'Violets'

 ©2022 All Rights Reserved Lynne Perednia

Violets
By Kyung-Sook Shin
Literary Fiction
The Feminist Press at CUNY

In a world of lost and missed connections, a story such as Violets seems particularly fitting. 

The novel, by Kyung-Sook Shin, chronicles the life of a young Korean woman born into loneliness. When Oh San was born, her mother suffered postpartum depression and her father left. She is raised by her mother and paternal grandmother, who constantly fight. She has only one friend, another schoolgirl with only one parent. But one day they become too close and the girl refuses to have anything to do with San again.

In the 1990s, San is a young woman on her own in Seoul looking for work. She tried hairdressing, such as her mother did, but hated it. She's been taking word-processing classes and would love to do that work at a publishing house, but loses out on a job because she has no experience. A flower shop has a hand-written note for a woman took look after the flowers in its window. She sees it, but backs away, then returns a few days later.

Oh San fills her days and sometimes her nights at the flower shop. The owner does not speak and would rather be on his flower farm. His niece is the one who runs the shop. Lee Sue-ae and Oh San are the same age and have both been through trauma in their childhood. Sue-ae rebelled but has returned to the flower farm and shop, and has come into her own. She is more confident and assertive, and becomes San's roommate. She brings light and stability into San's life.

Two men who come into the shop also come into San's life. One is a businessman who often buys flowers from the shop for company business. Choi is big, bold, polite but interested in San, and he terrifies her with these traits. 

The other is a flower photographer who comes in on assignment to take picture of violets. The unnamed man hates the assignment, hates the flower and is not quiet about it. But he is taken by the appearance of San among the flowers with her head down and takes several photos of her amidst the blossoms. It's not an important event to San but suddenly, without warning, the idea of the photographer as a man overtakes her. She is beyond drawn to him. The idea of him becomes her entire existence.

Everything that happens in this short novel, every character that comes into San's life, every idea, shows different ways in which people may have good intentions but cannot always be counted on to be that way. Violets is a searing look at ways in which women with open hearts can have them broken. Violets also is an open-hearted look at how women seek ways to pick themselves back up. As one character asks about herself:

Was I always this fragile a woman?

And as is said of one character:

She pretends to be strong and cold but she is actually sensitive and vulnerable.

Kyung-Sook Shin, winner of the Man Asian Literary Prize, has crafted a story that gives women a chance to reflect on ways in which they have let their best selves shine, even when the characters here do not, and those who would care about them the chance to see them for who they are.