This was one of the books longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction and it was also part of the Readalong promoted by Asako on Discord. I’m sad to see that it didn’t make it to the shortlist. This is a fascinating novel about the life of a century-old woman living in an elderly home in South Korea.

We follow the story of one of the workers in that home that decides to interview the residents about their lives, to write obituaries. To trigger their memory, she asks them to define their lives in three words. All is going well until she meets an enigmatic old lady who instead of 3, gives her 8 words: slave, escape-artist, murderer, terrorist, spy, lover, mother (which is actually 7 words, but that’s part of her game).

In this book, each chapter tells the story of one of those 8 lives, but they are not in chronological order (it starts with the 5th life). Putting the puzzle together and figuring out what’s the word that defines that part of her life is great fun.

The prologue is written in first person, and for a while, I thought that was a real story, that the narrator there was the author of the book. It’s not the first time. I was fooled by Yann Martel before, and read the whole Life of Pi thinking that the main character really existed.

And this only attests to the quality of the writing in both cases.

That being said, the content of the book is heavy. The protagonist spent most of her youth suffering the consequences of two wars (the Word War II and the Korean War), just to face the regime in North Korea after. I love historical fiction and this truly hit the spot for me.

The retelling of many scenes is brutal and, unfortunately, very real. It’s one of the books that I’m reading this year that left a profound impression of the Japanese occupation in East Asia. Nevertheless, the main character’s resilience and resourcefulness are inspiring.

The book plays a lot with the idea of different lives, identities and languages. It also changes narrating styles, alternating between first and third persons. This was confusing at first, but in the end, I liked how it played to the tone of the book, of a women living situations so surreal and distinct from one another that she could as well be living multiple lives.

Another thing that kept me hooked was that the possibility of deception was always present. We don’t know for sure if the elderly lady is telling the truth about herself, or even how old she truly is. The fictional writer of the book (the narrator in the prologue) suspects that from the beginning. She at first decides to play along, like a spectator in a show that is there to be entertained by the main star, regardless if the story is real or not.

In that sense, it’s only fair that I almost got fooled in the beginning by thinking that one of the characters was real. Whether it corresponds to reality or not, this is a great story worth reading.