Aamir

Oxford Soju Club by Jinwoo Park is an incredibly satisfying combination of spy intrigue and rumination on the struggle immigrants face with finding identity and meaning while navigating different cultures.

The intrigue comes from the plot which revolves around North Korean, South Korean, and Korean-American spies maneuvering around each other in the city of Oxford in England, as they carry out competing orders in a time of upheaval. The ruminations come from the novel's focus on how the characters feel about the life choices that brought them to the sleepy foreign city, their thoughts on their present, and their fears for the future. Both elements weave expertly around each other and provide drama both emotional and kinetic.

The novel starts with the mystery of the murder of a senior North Korean spy and jumps around in time as if follows about a half dozen characters affected by the death. Park doesn't hold the reader's hand or hold back on shocking developments, and his writing moves at a brisk place, but if readers trust him, as they should, they'll find he provides answers in due course which are satisfying while keeping questions open until the final pages. The final question asked by one of the main characters, especially is incredibly emotive and a worthy emotional climax. Deep dives into Korean culture, especially in the form of cuisine, add rich subtext and authenticity as do the evocative descriptions of the geography of Oxford and the interior of the titular restaurant, "The Oxford Soju Club" where a lot of the story takes place.

This is a story that rewards multiple read throughs. The various plot riddles and their resolutions are prominent in the first go around. After this, with the major mysteries solved, subsequent reads feel like a conversation with a thoughtful friend about the oddities of living a life caught between multiple worlds.

Highly recommended to fans of either intrigue, deep character studies, or immigrant stories. As I enjoy all three, this was an amazing story to have experienced.

Thanks to NetGalley and Dundurn Press for sending me an advance reader's copy for review consideration. All opinions are my own.

This review uses some coded words in order to avoid censure or suppression. A version of the review without the coded words can be found on the reviewer’s personal website.

The vile American backed war criminal state hates Refat Alareer, the author of “If I Must Die” which is a collection of his works, for the same reason that it hates the boycott movement and the UN agencies that are staffed by his people. The reason being that any sign of non-violent resistance towards its atrocity filled occupation, whether it be through the arts, or advocacy, or even bureaucracy, destroys the morally bankrupt and violent ideology which it derives its legitimacy from. An ethno-supremacist ideology whose foundation rests on nothing more than mindless bigotry against Alareer’s people.

Alareer, a professor of English Literature as well as teacher, editor and writer, accomplishes this by the simple act of recording, in spare yet descriptive language the facts of his people’s lives under occupation.

About forty of these short pieces are collected here roughly in the order they were written, from 2010 to 2023.

The first of these works is a retelling of Jonathon Swift’s A Modest Proposal. It is, I feel, the weakest part of the book as the adaptation of the Irish satire to his situation felt forced. Every other however belongs completely to him and his people even though they are written in English, the language of the British, who gave away Alareer’s land even though they had no right to, and the Americans who continue to fund and arm the crime of crimes being committed against his people for more than seven decades and counting.

The first 180 pages of the collection were written before October 2023. They describe the experience of his people as one of unending oppression punctuated by days of extreme violence. The tragedies inflicted on Alareer, his family, and his people should be overwhelming, but his words also highlight the resilience of his people. It is impossible to get more than a bare glimmer of understanding of the horror that Alareer’s people face or the beauty of the culture that is able to withstand it with steadfastness. That Alareer is able to provide these glimmers over and over is a testament to his skill and to his heart.

The last 72 pages consist of what Alareer wrote and said in interviews from October to early December 2023. The horror is that what he recounts of his people being massacred by the hateful state is not very different from all he wrote before, it just happens harder, faster, without pause.

It is the rare page of “I Must Die” that will not shatter a feeling heart, the few that do not are setting up the ones that will. But the heart that will break will be an ignorant one and in need of breaking. The one that will grow in its place will not only be more aware but also more committed to justice, resistance, and freedom for Alareer’s people. It is his triumph, a triumph that belongs not only to him but to all of his people who will be remembered for their resistance to tyranny and oppression and the heavy price they paid for the freedom that they will have wrested for themselves soon, Inshallah.

Throughout this review I have been speaking of Refaat Alareer in the present even though he was ripped from this world by a cowardly airstrike from the war criminal state in December 2023 on a residential apartment block. An attack that ended not only his life but that of his siblings and some of his nephews and nieces as well.

This is because he lives still through all of those who read and remember his words and commit to action to end the injustices visited upon him and all of his people. He has done his part in bringing to the world stories of freedom for his people and proving the hollowness of the stories told by their oppressors. Now the torch has been passed to us to take the next step and bring that story to fruition.

As he notes. “Don’t forget that <the land> was first and foremost occupied in the <ethno-supremacist ideologies’> literature and… poetry”.

And so his country is freed first and foremost in Refaat’s literature and his poetry. And not only his, as he makes clear he comes from a long line of writers and fighters and poets; a link in a chain that will extend far into the future and will become the reality of his people living and building in their free land in all of it’s entirety.

This is required reading for the whole world as far as I’m concerned.