Pages: 134 . Enjoyment Factor: 6/10 . Ease of Understanding: 5/10
I finished my first Korean novel this weekend. It’s called “I have the Right to Destroy Myself” by Kim Young-Ha and is about a guy who makes a living by helping people commit suicide. It was a pretty heavy, at times bizarre read. I enjoyed the book – especially Kim Young-Ha’s style of writing and the scenic presentation – but in the end I’m not sure how much I’m actually taking away from it. This might be partly because of the bleak subject matter and partly because reading a novel in Korean is still much different from reading one in my better languages.
It was certainly challenging to read this novel and it reminded me of how many fairly basic words I still need to learn. But my reading skills quite a bit throughout the book. At the beginning I was often lost, having a hard time to understand some scenes in their entirety. I had to read most paragraphs twice or three times to really understand them. Then I started to get into the story, got used to some words an expressions and looked up more unknown words. I was able to understand some paragraphs without any look-ups – usually those with a lot of dialogue. Some of the descriptive and philosophical passages were the most challenging and I looked up a lot of words for them, because I wanted to understand what the novel is about apart from the rough plot.
I’m glad I took to leap and started reading literature and I’m looking forward to more of it. “I Have the Right to Destroy Myself” is not a bad choice for starting to read literature in Korean. Although literary, thhe language is rather straightforward and the sentences aren’t too long and complicated. It’s not historical, so the words are quite useful. There are also quite a few foreign terms from English and other European languages – part of the story takes place in Italy. That made the book a little easier to understand for me, although there was some guesswork involved with the Hangeul rendering of words I know in their original.
Renatie Smartie 
It sounds like a discouraging book 😦
The subject is certainly not very encouraging. I suppose this is true for much ‘serious’ literature and for some reason that’s what I can get a hold of most easily in Germany. At the moment I’m reading a story about a man who battles ants who take over his apartment and make him go mad. This one is actually worse 😀 I plan to ask Koreans I know if they can lend or sell me some old books. I hope that I’ll get to read less depressing stuff that way and hopefully also some non-fiction.
A lot of reviews of Korean literature here http://www.ktlit.com, including the new Asia Publishers series, which features books that are short, cheap, and bilingual.
Thanks for the suggestion, I’ll have a look at the site! Unfortunately it’s rather expensive to order most Korean books in Germany, so I’m just reading whatever is available at the one Korean bookstore I know here or what I get from Korean friends.