Whale

14 hrs. 13 min.

Language Russian

Author Chhon Myongvan

Narrator Varvara Sapova

Description

A novel by Cheon Myeongwan—one of the most distinctive authors of contemporary Korean prose. The Whale was named among the finalists for the 2023 International Booker Prize. This is a magically grotesque saga that Words Without Borders places “between Geek Love by Catherine Dunne and Shame by Salman Rushdie,” while the Financial Times calls it “an unusual Korean response to Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations.”

In ruined postwar Korea, the shrewd Kymbok uses money seized from a greedy old woman to build a brick factory—the first stone in the foundation of her future empire. Around her, the fates of a port strongman, a one-eyed ruler of bees, and a love-struck yakuza converge and tangle. But everything collapses when her greatest achievement—a grand movie theater shaped like a whale—burns to the ground: the fire takes more than eight hundred lives and alters the course of the city’s history. On the defendant’s bench sits her daughter, the mute giantess Chhunhi, whose only close companion is a talking circus elephant. So who is really to blame? And isn’t there, behind the city chronicle’s most terrible catastrophe, the ghost of the ugly old woman—whose curse seems to haunt everyone who has touched her mysterious money?..

The Whale is a surreal panopticon where Korean folklore is woven together with the magical realism of Gabriel García Márquez, and its satirical sweep echoes the best books by Kurt Vonnegut.

The novel is published in a new edition.