I picked up WHALE after it was nominated for the International Booker Prize, and I was pleased to see that it made it to the shortlist - a well-deserved honor. WHALE is a Korean generational epic, a tale spun with magic realism, telling the tale of 3 generations of women in rural Korea.

The book begins with the return of Chunhui, a mute young woman, to the ruins of her village after a stay in prison. We then spin back in time to her mother Geumbok, who overcame poverty to become a wealthy entrepreneur in a patriarchal society, and move forward, tracing the rise and fall of her fortune as Korea undergoes modernization, until we reach the present day once more. Throughout the entire tale is interspersed an author's chorus beginning "This/That was the law of..." which conveys a sense of fate and inevitability. The cast of characters contains certain deliberate tropes - the con man/smuggler/pimp, the poor man with a heart of gold - who give the story a fairy tale-like feel.

The book that comes to mind as a comparison is Gabriel Garcia Marquez's ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE - though the tone of the two books is very different - SOLITUDE being almost a dream-like magical realism in comparison to WHALE's earthy, uninhibited one. This doesn't always make for easy, pleasant reading - but it is undeniably captivating.