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THE
INTERPRETER is bold and edgy, haunting and lyrical. Suki Kim fractures the
image of the happy Asian immigrant and reassembles it shard by compelling
shard.
--Manil Suri, author of The Death of Vishnu
Kim earns the small, beautiful shiver of sadness...that speaks succinctly
of memory, pain, isolation and regret.
--Katherine Dieckmann, The New York Times Book Review
Fascinating ...a seductive allegory spun out in appropriately broken
prose, that figures translation as detective work..
--Mark Rozzo, Los
Angeles Times
Kim has come up with one of the most original and disturbing motives for
murder that this reader has ever encountered. It brings into play
loyalty, cultural differences and the sometimes lonely existence of our
nation's many immigrants.
--Carol Memmott, USA Today
More than a murder mystery...its fascination lies in how these
traditional story lines, so often reassuring and affirming, here unsettle
and disturb.
--Judith Maas, The Boston Globe
Kim zeroes in on the debilitating tensions of interpreting between
languages, countries, childhood and adulthood, lies and secrets, sex and
hurt, anger and love.
--Celia McGee, NY Daily News
Kim's authorial vision is ambitious... Most readers will no doubt
look forward to her next work.
--Bharti Kirchner, The San Francisco Chronicle
Outstanding...Most admirably, Kim avoids identity politics entirely.
She is not interested in ghettoizing her protagonist. Suzy is a character
first, a representation of human psychology, one that Kim has studied too
carefully to label simply as Korean, or Depressed.
--Max Watman, The New Criterion
Riveting . . . No mere whodunit, Kim's debut also examines the myth
of the “model minority” and what it's like to live in cultural
limbo.
--Elisabeth Egan, Glamour
Amazing...The author's a master tease, surrendering details
so slowly that you'll find yourself in such a frenzy to get to the next
chapter that you'll skim the one you're on.
--Katy McColl, Jane
A sleek, nearly hypnotic glimpse into the world of a Korean family
ruptured in translation to America.
--Kirkus Reviews
Few writers chronicle the Korean-American experience, and even fewer are
as talented as Kim . . . A good eye for detail, an excellent prose style
and the ability to create compelling characters...luminous...hypnotic.
. . an intriguing, tortured portrait of a second-generation
Korean-American by a promising young writer.
--Publishers Weekly
The Interpreter is a melancholy study of a young Korean-American
woman's alienation from both her Asian roots and her American environment.
It's also a murder mystery. That Kim makes these two aspects of the novel
work together suggests that she's a writer to keep an eye on.
--Charles Matthews, San Jose Mercury News
Deftly crafted, original and fitted together by a complex, believable and
interesting character, the enjoyment is intense...A stunning first
novel....In these hauntingly enthralling pages, Kim expertly snaps her
debut puzzle together and leaves us anxiously awaiting her next.
--Thomas Haley, The Minneapolis Star Tribune
Powerful and memorable...engaging and haunting...It lingers in one's
thoughts long past the last page. Suki Kim does it with literary finesse.
--Nora Seton, The Houston Chronicle
This moving portrait of a young woman alone in the world will stick with readers
for a long time.
--Ethan LaCroix, TimeOut New York
Utterly absorbing... stylish and elegant psychological mystery.
--Margaret Cannon, Toronto Globe and Mail
Captivating...unique and hybrid work of fiction...I couldn't put it
down.
--Brad Howley, The Anniston Star
10 Best to do: Read it...a thought-provoking novel.
--Marie Claire
In Suzy Park, Kim has fashioned a moody, memorable misfit who both
captures our heart and twists our guts in one of the new year's more
complex and rewarding novels.
--Jay MacDonald, The News-Press
Kim's slice of the Korean American pie is a refreshing departure from a
lot of recent Korean American fiction.
--Joanna Rhim Lee, Korean Quarterly
Kim's use of language in this literary thriller is crisp, at times
almost atmospherically poetic; her plotting and sense of pacing is taut.
--Mindi Dickstein, St. Petersburg Times
Powerful construction...a
realistic portrait of an entire American sub-culture presented against the
backdrop of what at first appears to be the story of a woman coming to
grips with her lost family.
--Scott Dietsch, The Villager
Thoughtful mystery...The deftness and authority with
which Suki Kim writes are dazzling...I've read it twice already, and
I may return to it again while I wait until Suki Kim writes her next novel.
--Josephine Bridges, The Asian Reporter
.TOP
INTERVIEWS
“Asia
Society: Asia Source Magazine Interview," March 2003
“New
Yorkorean translator: Novelist Suki Kim plumbs a divided soul in The
Interpreter,”
The New York Daily News, February 10, 2003
“Literary
Vagabond Suki Kim Makes Her Debut,” Asianweek,
January 2003
“Ten to Watch in 2003, Suki Kim: The New
Electra,” Book Magazine,
The Newcomers Issue January / February 2003
“The Missing Ink: 5 new authors certain to alter
the way we envision contemporary literature,” Shout Magazine, March 2002
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“Ten to Watch in 2003
Suki Kim: The New Electra”
Published in Book Magazine, the Newcomers Issue
January / February 2003
“I really wanted to write an American book,” Suki Kim says.
“And to me, what America
is about, in some way, is killing your parents.” Although
Kim’s parents are alive and living in New
Jersey, the parents of Suzy
Park, the protagonist of
Kim’s atmospheric, noirish novel The Interpreter, have been
murdered, inspiring the amoral, alienated Suzy to conduct an
investigation that leads her into the Korean immigrant underworld.
Kim’s plot may be fictional, but the feelings of rootlessness and
dislocation in The Interpreter are not. Arriving with her family
in New York at the age of
thirteen, after having spent her childhood in Seoul,
South Korea, Kim
says she felt she had to leave behind her ancestry for a while in order
to survive. “It took years for me to learn English,” she
says. “I found it very humiliating. I felt like an exiled writer
when I was thirteen. A lot of things happened not by my choice. They were
killed off is how I look at it.”
-- Adam Langer
.....TOP ..........INTERVIEWS
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“The Missing Ink: Shout brings you 5 new
authors certain to alter the way we envision contemporary literature”
Published in Shout Magazine, March 2002
Set in the murky, nicotine-stained rooms of New York City
courthouses, Suki Kim's first novel, The Interpreter, positively
drips with a noir-ish sense of doom. “Cigarette at nine a.m. is a sure sign of desperation,”
the novel begins. Kim's heroine, a court translator named Suzy
Park, harbors more secrets
than befits the average 29-year-old; and in clinging to these secrets
she's alienated herself from her family, her friends, and the larger
Korean immigrant community. To her married lover and to readers of this
compelling, cryptic novel, Suzy is a gorgeous enigma, simultaneously
sophisticated and naive, corrupt and pure.
Like her protagonist, the young novelist is absolutely unafraid of
carving out her own path. In 1998, Kim sublet her East
Village apartment, packed up
her clothing, and embarked on a two-year tour of the world's artists'
colonies. “Ucross, Millay, Djerassi, Hedgebrook, MacDowell, I went
to all of them.”
“You have to be fearless,” she posits, “to just take
off like that. It was nerve-wracking at times. I was in a state of
suspended animation, packing up my stuff every month and moving to a
different colony. My personality would change to suit each new place. And
I became addicted to [the constant travel], became restless if I stayed
in one place too long. Eventually, I just broke down.”
Upon returning to New York,
Kim, who emigrated from Korea
at age thirteen, began working as a court interpreter, as a research for
her novel. Interpretation is Suzy's career, but it also serves as a
potent metaphor for the manner in which she lives her life, constantly
walking the line between larger American society and the tightly knit
Korean community. “Language has always been sort of a love and hate
thing for me,” Kim explains. “Because I came here later on,
learned English later on, I was always translating from one language to
another. There's always something that's lost in the translation, and
that's always really upset me.”
Though the novel hinges on a mystery, Kim sees The Interpreter
primarily as an answer to those cheery bestsellers that portray Asians as
“linked to a spiritual answer,” or as an attempt to portray
“the dark side of the Asian immigrant success story,”
The stereotype is that of second-generation Asian immigrants faring very
well in the States. “Suzy
Park is what happens when it
doesn't work,” says Kim. “She's not able to function. She
can't translate.”
--Joanna Smith Rakoff
.....TOP ..........INTERVIEWS
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