The RAS Korean Literature Club discussion

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I present below, after my introductory commentary, the prolific British book-reviewer Marc Nash's review of Blowfish (by Kyung-ran Jo; tr. Chi-young Kim, July 2025).

Blowfish is this Club's August 2025 book for the in-person gathering of Thursday, August 14. Chatter tells me that reception so far has been decidedly mixed but leaning negative. Marc Nash's mostly-positive review balances some of the negative ones.

Marc Nash (who is an author with a GR author-page in his own right) reads and reviews around 150 to 200 of these kinds of fiction works per year. He has a considerable following.

Marc Nash is interested these days in translated fiction, and more than one of his late-July 2025 tranche of reviews are translated-fiction. He has effectively zero ties, however, to the "Korean literature-in-translation" world, except as an occasional reader starting in the late 2010s.

Take his views as those of a well-meaning outsider, English-native-reading, non-Korea-connected, literary-fiction connoisseur.

Here is the Marc Nash review of Blowfish, transcribed and adapted to text form, by me (Peter J.), from Youtube:

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REVIEW OF BLOWFISH

by Marc Nash (UK)
Read and reviewed in late-July 2025
670 words

RATING: 4 / 5

Blowfish is a book about two people in Korea -- well, Korea and Japan, I should say, because the book switches between Seoul and Tokyo -- who've both been deeply affected by familial suicides.

The woman is an installation artist. Her grandmother, who she was very close to, committed suicide. And eventually her father does the same, but she's less close to her father. It's really the grandmother's suicide that's impacted on her.

The Japanese man is an architect, whose brother commits suicide. And it's such a blow to the family that this architect remains working in architecture but gives up all his dreams and hopes. He moves back in with his parents, who are absolutely crushed by the suicide of their [other] son.

So, there are two characters who literally see 'embodiments' of the suicide in their lives.

The woman almost is haunted by this spectre of a beast who's always chattering into her ear that she should commit suicide. Whereas the man is is haunted by the spectre of his brother, who he sees and talks to. And they sort of find each other.

The woman artist is determined that, after her next art exhibition, she's going to commit suicide. And [the man] realizes this. He intuits it. And he's wondering desperately how he can prevent her, without ever making it overt and accusing her. Even though she's going to do it, he doesn't want to almost 'force her hand' and bring it out into the open. But he knows that's what she's going to do, and he's thinking of ways to impede it.

She's going to do it by partaking of blowfish poison. There's long section whereby she befriends a very strange guy who runs a shop where he prepares and sells blowfish sushi. But obviously he's treated it and removed all the toxins. She sort of [befriends] him because she wants to find out which bits are toxic, how she can achieve the suicide.

So, it's very interesting -- until I got the sense of sentimentality. Just like I didn't like the sentimentality of A Graveyard of First Chapters [another of Marc Nash's late-July 2025 reviews], I rather felt it inevitable that this was going to lapse into sentimentality between the man and the woman.

This is a love affair at a distance. It's never consummated. It never has to be. But the man pledges that he's going to save the woman from committing suicide. There is something within the writing of this book that (a.) made that obvious, to me; and (b.) made it tinge with sentimentality, rather than the sort of hard-nosed thrust of the female artist up until then. I knock a star off for that, because, as you can probably guess, I'm not a big for sentimentality.

I want to a final comment about her art. It's really interesting. She makes these installations with interesting materials: [For example,] it's a sculpture of a boy, but it's a kinetic sculpture. It's morphing into an old man, and then back again from the old man to the boy. I found that a really interesting concept for the art. I did like that sort of detail.

This is her, when she's window shopping:

"A bamboo cutting board, a tea set, leather shoes and a bag. A dinosaur robot with sensors. A hefty notebook she picked up and put down several times. A feather pen. An object's initial power was in the way it drew out possessiveness. A feeling that began with ordinary desire. She'd been thinking about the power inherent in objects. A part of her thoughts have been devoted to the special objects at the center of her work."

I really like that line, that notion that "an object's initial power was in the way it drew out possessiveness. A feeling that began with ordinary desire."

This book is dotted with lots of these really interesting observations on life and art. And the nature of the objects that she's describing.

I gave [Blowfish] four stars.

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(End of Marc Nash review of Blowfish by Kyung-ran Jo; review transcribed and adapted to text by Peter J. --- original at: https://tinyurl.com/55sf7dr6 ).

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Good review. I have been curious about who would like this book. It seems like people who like perhaps semi-poetic perhaps semi-(or not so semi-) borish descriptions and listlike observations will enjoy the writing style. More power to such people, whoever they may be. Also people who like floaty unconsummated sentimental "relationships"-- a tendency I do see in Korean culture including in the (annoying to me) sentimentality about so-called "first loves."

Still though I have yet to see a raving 5 star review of this book. Some people like it but it seems nobody loves it. Am I wrong?

I watched his review which gave me a little desire to back a read it. I sort of gave up after chapter 4 not being able to be pulled into to the story enough to want to keep going. Part of my distaste for it lies in the medium itself in which I found it. On my library app, it is only available in the annoying Libby reader which the app provides, rather than being able to open it in the Kindle reader app. It may sound like a petty grievance but those 2 apps are like night and day to me. The Libby one doesn’t allow for copying text which is key for me to more easily take notes. Overall, I just find the app annoying and it discourages me from reading books on it. I don't know why Blowfish is not accessible on the Kindle app from my Libby library app. Perhaps it's dues to the newness of the novel.

;
RE: Grievances with reading on apps. ---- I'll be glad to let you borrow the paper version, if you want.

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RE: Reading vs watching.

Some thoughts, inspired by Marc Nash's Youtube review vs. my conversion to text of the same "content"

The adapted text version of the Marc Nash Blowfish review, clocking in at 670 words, I find text versions like that more useful than the original video in most cases, maybe almost all cases.

(I assume also the text version may have a far-longer life-span than the video, years or decades to come, if that matters to anyone. I've noticed most video-links from a mere ten years ago seem to be dead, one way or another. Text tends to survive.)

Why have people moved towards video reviews? They think the audience is there. The audience, in turn, thinks it's easier to consume video content than read (ears > eyes). Perhaps many reviewers think it's easier to talk to the camera than write, though I wouldn't accuse Marc Nash of that, I would I think so accuse many of the Bookstagrammers. The assumptions behind the drive towards video-reviews are generally false, I think: Text is superior, when possible.

The video-consumption process involves clicking onto the video, finding the right place to listen to what you want (in this case a 4m45s relevant portion of the review of Blowfish), so all in all it might well take 6m. Marc Nash speaks relatively fast, so anything above a 1.25x speed (or perhaps even at it) may tend to cause serious comprehension-loss, negating the point of the speed-up.

I've always found video harder to deal with in a wide range of ways: harder to skim, harder back up to catch something you missed; a process nearly instant for printed-text on paper but can cause significant little delays in video-format, so if you read like that it might go from a 6m time-investment to 8m+.

The text version, a rapid read of 670 words would be little over 2m. A slow read, 3m.

But maybe most importantly, I find it harder, in practice (for me), to concentrate, to "get something" from the audio or video format. So the text form, for me, is lower time-commitment, plus higher comprehension.

As general comment, video also necessarily encourages the rise of social-media personalities (who tend to be more pleasing to the eye, younger, and less male) than Marc Nash. The accoutrements many of them bring to the thing are not of much interest to me. The Instagram-ification of things is something interesting to have seen in these past ten years or so, but overall I would not count myself a fan.

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[Tangential]

A distant memory from the late 2000s, but which still feels quite fresh to me:

I long ago gave up on the idea of audio-books and these days tend to take audio-content only for light purposes.

I think I can trace this tendency to my early 20s in the US. I had gotten a fairly good job with a lot of time, when no one would notice or care if I was listening to something. I resolved to listen to audio-books, and loaded up on them after the suggestion by a co-worker similarly situated. He had discovered the company genuinely didn't care if we listened to earphones while on the clock.

(All these years later, I still remember that guy but haven't seen him since. He came in with the same 'intake' of junior people I did, so we were by-default friends, though not at all to the extremes that Asians tend to take the concept. This guy, the audio-book suggester, would introduce himself that he shared the surname with the Lincoln assassin but that he'd confirmed they were unrelated.

I remember how he complained to me, often, he wanted to talk his way into outdoor assignments -- this was a firm that among other things created maps using high-tech equipment, so there was some of that -- and didn't want to be what he called a "desk jockey." Resentment at time spent with boring tasks in an office led to his audio-book crusade.)

For a few weeks or months trying to listen to audio-books, I realized how often failed to get much from them. That may be influenced by the types of books I tried to consume in that form.

Flash forward ten years and there were these huge strides being made by people producing video content, which tends to be a far-less-efficient medium than a well-produced audiobook. I was "on the wrong side of history" on that one.

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Interesting the direction this thread is going. I basically agree with everything you say Peter. I also strongly prefer reading texts for the very same reasons you mention. So far audiobooks have been a disaster for me. I did like you though try them and I absorbed maybe 10% of what I heard? Sometimes though I think I've gone too far in the direction of preferring text as in many cases it can be preferable to actually having to talk to people. In the same way, I'm probably better at expressing my thoughts in writing then through speaking.

I did laugh out loud at the younger and less male part though. That's a world I don't know anything about. Although generally I do prefer text, I listen to a lot of podcasts which happened to appear as videos on YouTube mainly when I'm tasks like housework or cooking. I engage in a shockingly huge amount of unpaid menial labor and to make it more bearable I like to listen to something interesting. The vast majority of what I listen to is done by very male people not so younger and pleasing to the eye or not is debatable. Think Andrew Huberman, Lex Fridman, Peter Attia etc. The best podcasts (and I would say Huberman is among the best) are like a very high quality lecture or listening in on an excellent conversation. I do enjoy those just as much as text but I'm only able to concentrate on them if I'm doing menial labor at the same time. Oh I also love Martha Beck's live streams and I listen to them almost every night while I'm falling asleep as she is my best and only spiritual guru despite being a bit woo woo for me, but she's almost 60 so although female not younger.

This is a tangent too but my whole life has been lived mostly surrounded by men. In college, my classes were at least 70% male and in graduate school that went up to above 90% mostly. Even the classes I teach in companies are mostly if not all men, and most of the friends I have seem to be men too. So I'm not really aware of the female dominated world you appear to have witnessed. I'm sure it exists but I forgot that it did.

Oh I forgot to say that we should thank you for sacrificing yourself and actually watching a video in order to transcribe it, not an easy task. I would not have watched the review, so your transcription was helpful to me.

Very tangentially, I find it amazing and slightly depressing that other people somehow have distant memories that feel fresh and managed to be detailed. That sort of thing is called episodic memory and it's distinct from other types of memory like remembering vocabulary words or memorizing numbers. The latter I am good to quite good at-- I just can't remember my own life very well. Google photos hopefully shows me this day x number of years ago and there I am wearing clothes I don't quite remember owning sometimes in places I have long ago forgotten the name of. I visited a lot of places in the Kansai province in Japan and I have pictures to prove it but I can't remember the names of any of the places I visited except major city names like Osaka and Kyoto. Anyway I should end this tangent. The point is I am slightly envious of your detailed memory.

Peter wrote: ".

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I present below, after my introductory commentary, the prolific British book-reviewer Marc Nash's review of
Blowfish
(by Kyung-ran Jo; tr. Chi-young Kim, July 2025). ..."

This is funny… I saw a notification of your post from the GR app on my phone when I woke up this morning and opened it but had trouble finding the review you referred to. But I half- remembered the name and found what I thought was the review in question, by Marcus (Lit_Laugh_Luv) 374 reviews 628 followers, dated May 12 2025. It’s right at the top of the user reviews and easy to find or even link to, but I’ll adhere to your practice and inline it here:

BEGIN Marcus (Lit_Laugh_Luv) review

Blowfish was in my top five most anticipated releases of 2025, and sadly, I must admit I did not love it. After 75% I am so bored and sick of wading through the superfluous writing that it is time I call it quits. The premise is interesting, but the dual narratives and lack of chronology make the reader detached from either protagonist. The female sculptor is infinitely more interesting than the man, whose chapters felt like a chore. In over 200 pages, virtually nothing has happened - there is no plot, little character development, and the relationship between our two protagonists has hardly evolved. Also I know ARCs aren't finalized, but my gosh the volume of typos and misplaced words were making some paragraphs borderline illegible. :(

There are some interesting remarks about death, autonomy, and dignity buried somewhere in here, but they become lost in the superfluous sentences that add nothing. Tension and a darker atmosphere feel forced by the writing, rather than arising organically. For example:

She exited her apartment quietly, closing the front door behind her. Umbrellas hung from each unit's windowsill along the hallway. The floor was puddled with rainwater. It had rained in the afternoon, and more was in the forecast for tomorrow. The forecast was often more accurate than not. She went down the emergency stairwell to the ground floor. The stairs were steep and dark. It smelled like a tire recycling plant.

This seems like a petty example, but it encapsulates how bloated this story is. The writing gets in its own way, and scenes are overwrought with detail that doesn't add anything. A good editor could have chopped out 50% of the word count and salvaged a more enjoyable read from this. As it stands, I don't need every action to necessitate a full paragraph - take those stairs and get out of the damn apartment, queen.

I've seen this book compared to Han Kang and while I think there is thematic overlap, Kang is ultimately a much stronger writer who weaves imagery and symbolism into her stories with meaning. This has the potential to be a decent novella or short story, but as someone who never shies away from plotless, slow books, this was too monotonous even for me. Thank you to the publisher for the ARC.

END Marcus (Lit_Laugh_Luv) review

Peter wrote: ":
RE: Reading vs watching.

Some thoughts, inspired by Marc Nash's Youtube review vs. my conversion to text of the same "content"

The adapted text version of the Marc Nash Blowfish review, clocki..."

One advantage I find to listening rather than reading is that I can multitask that way. I guess technically it's a combination. But a review of a book is something I could listen to in the background without giving it my full attention. I'm just listening for the gist of the review. Also, since he was reviewing many books, I might hear a suggestion for something new which I hadn't heard before. So, I generally prefer the video reviews.

John Armstrong,

I read the review you posted above by Marcus a couple weeks ago and I think the examples he gives are good as to how the writing may be way too bloated for some people's tastes. Also, as I've been reading it in Korean, personally I think her sentence style is unusually hard to follow grammatically. She is much much harder for me to read than Han Kang for example or any other book I've attempted in Korean either whether it's a book originally written in Korean or a book translated from Japanese into Korean (which I read a lot of).

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Marc Nash's review of Blowfish was today shared with the Club's KakaoTalk group. A positive response, I think, from those who read the review through that medium.

Marc Nash's relative positivity on Blowfish is needed because to balance out the many negative opinions, which have set the tone a bit.

The book loses a lot of people in its first 10%, I think, because it starts too slow. Towards the middle it gets more interesting. It's understandable how some might give up on it and many of the relatively negative reviews could be from those who either never read to the middle or who lost confidence in the story early on and could not get it back.

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A few errors in this review (my adaptation of Marc Nash's video review) have been corrected. The most glaring was the first paragraph ending with the phrase "familiar suicides," whereas "familial suicides" is clearly correct for Blowfish.

(The "familiar/familial" error is probably an example of an artifact of auto-transcription misidentifying the word, and it then also falling through the cracks of spellcheck and my own oversight. Spotted readily however by M., who helpfully flagged it.)

"Familial: Yes, intergenerational dynamics; a theme of steady interest to Kyung-ran Jo . See also: my review of "I Live in Bongcheon-dong: https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/... .

I'm curious how you felt about the book, Peter. I admit I am guilty of setting the tone in a more negative direction this time. I do wish that future book club picks could be sold to me more convincing, although I admit I am probably an outlier here in that I'm more interested in non-fiction and thus reluctant to invest my time in a novel unless someone convinces me I should. Anyway I hope you let us know how (or if) you enjoyed the book.