Reviews with content warning for Suicide - Saha

Saha is the name of a housing project on the outskirts of Town, an island nation owned by a corporate entity and ruled by a shadowy governance board. Town is organized according to the haves (Ls), who are white-collar laborers who can participate in the high-profit sectors of Town like the bio-tech and IT industries, and have full-citizenship; and the have-nots (L2) who are blue-collar laborers that fill the remaining roles in this small economy and are only legally in Town via 2-year work visas, despite many of them predating the establishment of the Town nation-state. In Town, as in every country, there also exists members of the community who are not present "legally" - called "Sahas" for the name of the housing project where many of them live. This book follows some residents of the Saha Estates.

The premise of this book is brilliant, I mean just reading that synopsis I was like YES this is a dystopian novel about capitalist-governance and its very real consequences for average people. The book starts off strong, introducing us to some core characters but, more importantly, introducing us to Town, its structure, its genesis, etc. A corporate bio-tech government that takes power in a very simple but completely realistic way - haven't you read stories in the news about massive corporations moving into town, buying up all viable property, forcing the locals out, and greasing palms in local government until the company is the town? Thinking (from my American POV) of Virginian coal mines, United Fruit Company in Central America, pineapples in Hawaii. It's happened for centuries, it's happening now, and in this novel, Cho Nam-Joo simply takes those developments to their natural next step.

I hate when people flippantly compare any dystopian novel to 1984 and any feminist novel to Handmaid's Tale, so I won't do that... but I want to. This book nails the almost horror-like specter of the State leering, monitoring one's every move although you cannot quite know for certain when, where, or how, as well as the hopelessness of people surviving, and it culminates in a final confrontation of the established order, much like in Orwell's novels. Both authors warn of unchecked accumulation of power/wealth - Orwell warns of the dangerous ideology of "communism", and in Saha we see instead the future of the dangerous ideology of capitalism, and its current/ongoing unification with government.

All that being said, I felt disappointed by this novel. As you can see, I was very excited by the premise and set-up but the delivery fell short of the mark. Primarily I have two complaints: first, there were too many character vignettes; second, that she could've done so much more with this premise. Because the book doesn't do enough to serve as a critique of capitalism (or anything else), it ends up as just a nice story of impoverished people barred from society's upper echelons. My third, smaller critique, is that at times the translation felt very unnatural and choppy.

Although the beginning sets us up for an intriguing story of Town and the Sahas who get by despite everything, the meat of the book relies upon vignettes of characters at the Saha Estates and the combination of so many - at times unconnected - vignettes made the book feel disjointed. I also thought many of the characters' stories did not necessarily add anything new that had not been covered already. For instance, the need to include what, 3 or 4 pregnant women and their babies, felt extremely superfluous and I could hardly keep each of them straight. We get it, women are the crux of the family, women are the crux of the community, women take the brunt of bodily oppression... but there was so much more she could've done with this!

This brings me to my second complaint: I wanted more oomph. If you're going to say something about capitalism at a point in time where 75% of people under the age of 30 are ready to see it fall, SAY IT LOUDLY. Going back to the example in the paragraph above, with all the women having babies - in a state where profit is the only thing that matters, I mean your leaders are literally doing profit analysis on human life, right? What could be more natural than encouraging women - half the laborers - to get abortions (and therefore, to continue working)? The closer you get to a purely capitalist state, the more readily available abortions should be. This is not a feminist stance, as feminism would argue that people should not have to choose between an income and a child, but this IS a capitalist stance - people cannot labor for profit when/if they have children, and capitalism values humans only when they are laboring for profit. But this book didn't really say much about these women and their babies except: oh, how sad. Between her first book and this one, I can see that motherhood is an important topic for the author, but if you just wanted to discuss how poorly women and mothers are treated in poverty, you didn't need a dystopian setting for that.

My third complaint was about the translation, although it might have been the editor and not the translator, I can't be certain, but there were times when I would be reading, thinking "What is this sentence structure? What did she mean here?" because the purpose of the sentence did not come across clearly. There were also some things that definitely should have been changed by the translator and if not, then caught by the editor. For example, this sentence: "When Do-kyung seized Su's wrist in surprise, Su slowly free herself from Do-kyung's grasp". In a scene where they are the only two people and he is the only person to have seized her wrist, why include his name a second time as opposed to his pronoun? For that matter, why include her name twice - she is the only 'she' in this scene, "her wrist" and "his grasp" would flow much more smoothly. BUT I DIGRESS.

Content Warnings

More...