Lemon

I'm not 100% sure I can well encapsulate my thoughts. This is the June book for the Small Press book club I attend, and reading the back I knew it'd appeal to me. “Parasite meets The Good Son in this piercing psychological portrait of three women haunted by a brutal, unsolved crime.”

It's a brisk 147 pages and reads easily. I had a hard time putting it down. We have a vague timeline, a smattering of characters, and the interior of their minds to think about for those pages, sometimes wondering whose head we're in, other times wondering what the point of a passage is. I am not sure all the questions are answered (rather, it is clear not all questions are answered), and I am okay with that. About halfway through the book I thought, “this would be great if x didn't happen,” and I wasn't disappointed.

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As an aside, I find that I really enjoy translated Korean works. I'm not sure why, maybe because the emotion inside of them is so tangible, and so palpable to me. PAST LIVES, Celine Song's directorial debut, was my favorite film of 2023. Flux, another work of Korean-American fiction, is another book from last year that I really enjoyed. There are some other examples in the recent past. Something about the way things translate, the resulting English feels often novel but perfect. It may not look exactly perfect on the page — you may be able to tell it's a translation — but the emotion it evokes works very well.

There's a passage in this book: “We were all seized by the same guilt, and the classroom was as still as the inside of a vacuum.” What a great utilization of a word with two images attached. The vacuum of space, and the inside of a Bissell. As my eyes read of quiet, my ears could just hear roaring. If the reader didn't get there on their own, the next page has the line, “Just like a vacuum that sucks up everything, she easily commanded all of our attention.” Once again, perfect utilization of one word, meaning two things, that works perfectly with both meanings. That is a lovely attention to detail.

Looking forward to hearing what others from the book club think!