My Pit-pat, pit-pat Brilliant Life

This is my first and only novel written by Kim Ae-ran, and I found it a very fulfilling read. Having immersed myself with endless tears reading the Korean version many months before, what I chiefly remembered was that it was something about a boy with chronic illness of early ageing and his dear family.

 

Regardless of my limited mileage points in this genre (I'm more into poems, travelogues etc) there is a lot to tell about these little kids-cum-parents. Daesu the father, especially, could be defined a tragi-comic character, the sort rampant throughout both the genre and this book. In other words, mostly everyone (parents with an elderly neighbour included) in the story represents of this kind of human nature. Only the boy's sensitive dad bears the brunt of jokes.

 

For the parents, there is not a lot of chocolate left in the chocolate box of life. In fact, they have had their rapidly ageing son hospitalized for the umpteenth time, and their son receives friendly attention and money with the help of a TV show. However, at the end of his short life, he arrives at a boyish transcension of his illness that he has been carrying all his 16-year-life.

 

Befitting the Korean language title roughly saying "pit-pat, pit-pat, my heart-throbbing life", the boy that can't be called young any more happily finds his life "brilliant" before being laid to rest.

 

Once again, with all this memory in Korean committed, I start to dash headlong into it in English. I chose this book exactly because of the whole book in Korean having been an out-and-out tearjerker throughout the read. I wanted to see whether its readers in the English world might be seduced to tears. And therein were the glaring themes, one of which the importance of recognizing one's own limit and nonetheless absorbing love from one's own life. Overall, this moving novel shows how much love a person (an early-ageing boy) can retain, with his tragi-comic family and friends helping him along the way.

 

The boy's finishing transcendency is presented beautifully in a soulful way. The built-up narrative is a bloc-by-bloc collection of pain and laughs - our boy likes humour and gossip on top of everyone. He always says this and knows that - At moments you can tell he's knowing, he's FEELING everything! He likes lively gossip and talks that way - and up till the final - I mean the final hours.

 

Interspersing throughout this book are funny, more ordinary and lively bits where the characters talk to each other. This piece about mothers and babies: "Three? What happened when he turned three?" "That's when they stop listening to you." Or the boy boasts: "Someone like me, who's a really great kid ..." "Yeah?" "...always comes from great parents." All the humour made me laugh and cry once again.

 

The style of Ae-ran Kim the prolific author is calmly enhanced by Chi-Young Kim's crisp and faithful translation, who softly and successfully hides the precise verbs with innocent waves of other word categories.

 

This novel sails on at a pace akin of the boy's aging. He understands capitalism. You see, he invites that TV show people to his life. He feels awash by posts and letters he got from that TV show and loves one correspondence in particular, later found to be more tantalizing than he expected. Then he goes on to complete a computer game, with the visual sense which the boy is rapidly losing thanks to his aging.

 

As the book unfolded in English with sudden yet gently cascading endings (I may say that as well in plural), I was amazed to sense once again the tears coming up. This novel about life is not religious at all but still succeeds to be fervently spiritual. 　

 

'My Brilliant Life : a novel' by Ae-ran Kim was published in 2020 by Tom Doherty Associates.