Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer's Reviews > One Hundred Shadows

This book is published by a small UK publisher Tilted Axis who publish “books that might not otherwise make it into English, for the very reasons that make them exciting to us – artistic originality, radical vision, the sense that here is something new.” Their name refers to their aim to tilt “the axis of world literature from the centre to the margins ...… where multiple traditions spark new forms and translation plays a crucial role.

It was founded by Deborah Smith, the English-Korean translator of Han Kang’s The Vegetarian and winner with her of the 2016 Man Booker International Prize – and now shortlisted with her for the 2018 Man Booker International Prize with the clear standout novel on that list The White Book.

This book is written by Hwang Jungeun and translated by Jung Yewon and was one of Tilted Axis’s first publications.

Paul’s review here, informed by his knowledge of Korean culture and language contains a very detailed discussion of this book which I could not hope to match.

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

I must admit though that where Paul calls the book “deceptively simple” I found it disappointingly simple (particularly having read reviews which perhaps over-emphasised the fantastical elements of the novel) – and while his review contains some of the deeper quotes in the novel, it omits some of the almost banal parts which perhaps culminates in a discussion of whorls (most of which consists of the word “whorl”) and which takes up nearly 3 pages of what is a less than 150 page book.