In modern-day Seoul, a laid-off worker stages a protest atop a factory chimney - as the months pass, he communes with his ancestors, three generations of railway workers over the first half of the 20th century…

I felt really positive about this one on finishing, even declaring that it had a strong chance of winning the InternationalBooker. In hindsight, I think it’s because I learnt so much from it. The bulk of the story is set during the years of Korea’s Japanese occupation before WWII, which I knew nothing about, and the characters are part of the working classes - I also learnt a lot about the communist movement(s) in occupied Korea, something I also knew nothing about.

But the thing is, the pacing of this book is a shocker (to be polite), and the more I think about it, the more it irritates me. With a lot of characters to keep track of, it took me quite some time to get into, until I suddenly realised I was hooked on the story and invested in (some of) the characters and couldn’t put it down. Then, towards the end, there are a few major information dumps which, while very interesting (particularly around the US administration of Korea immediately after Japan’s surrender), completely stuttered the flow of the story. And periodically, we come back to the guy up his chimney stack, whose story simply wasn’t as riveting as his that of his ancestors’.

I appreciated the Translators’ Note at the start discussing the reasoning around their translations of honorifics and place names. I enjoyed the inclusion of the old place names, but a map would have been a welcome addition, as would a family tree or character list. My complete unfamiliarity with Korean honorifics (not the book’s fault) added to my initial confusion over characters.

An ambitious multi-generational story, principally focussed on workers’ lives and fight for rights in Japanese-occupied Korea, highly enlightening but the detailed information dumps resulted in dreadful pacing.