Whale

A really bizarre book. I read it pretty much in one go. On a rare weekend to myself, much of it spent cycling along a canal.

That piece of pastoral English countryside will now forever transport me to this strange slice of Korean magical realism. One that seems really obsessed with heft, and chunk. In a way I never felt I fully got to the bottom of, but seemed distinctively its own.

For its sheer difference I really enjoyed it. However I feel any wider parable quality, may have gone straight over my head.

Instead there’s a strange, meandering ride that walks along with the lives of some of its characters, before racing forward through years with others.

I found the ending strangely unsatisfying, but perhaps fitting. Where I sit now, hundreds of human lives must have passed before. Virtually none remembered.

Resist as our egos might, that’s where we’re all headed.

This feels like a kind of memorial to someone who might have built bricks on this very spot, and lived a life more complicated, strange and magical than I could imagine without it.