Han Yujoo - This transfixing experimental novel questions where sleep ends and books begin, a concept borrowed from the works of French writer Maurice Blanchot, and the atmosphere of nightmarish dread and penetrating weirdness recalls a David Lynch film.”―

Han Yujoo, The Impossible Fairy Tale: A Novel, Trans. by Janet Hong,  Graywolf Press, 2017.


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A chilling, wildly original novel from a major new voice from South Korea

The Impossible Fairy Tale is the story of two unexceptional grade-school girls. Mia is “lucky”—she is spoiled by her mother and, as she explains, her two fathers. She gloats over her exotic imported color pencils and won’t be denied a coveted sweater. Then there is the Child who, by contrast, is neither lucky nor unlucky. She makes so little impression that she seems not even to merit a name.
At school, their fellow students, whether lucky or luckless or unlucky, seem consumed by an almost murderous rage. Adults are nearly invisible, and the society the children create on their own is marked by cruelty and soul-crushing hierarchies. Then, one day, the Child sneaks into the classroom after hours and adds ominous sentences to her classmates’ notebooks. This sinister but initially inconsequential act unlocks a series of events that end in horrible violence.
But that is not the end of this eerie, unpredictable novel. A teacher, who is also this book’s author, wakes from an intense dream. When she arrives at her next class, she recognizes a student: the Child, who knows about the events of the novel’s first half, which took place years earlier. Han Yujoo’s The Impossible Fairy Tale is a fresh and terrifying exploration of the ethics of art making and of the stinging consequences of neglect.


“If you’re going to write about love, write it in pencil.” Such is the philosophy of the little girl named Mia, who receives 72 colored pencils at the beginning of South Korean writer Han Yujoo’s extremely strange novel. We’re told that Mia has both the power to kill and the power to save, that she has two fathers, and that the year is 1998; Mia’s world also seems to be contained inside the dream of one of her teachers. But whether in dream, reality, or in the scenes Mia fills with pictures and colorful secrets, she is pursued by her opposite, the sadistic and nameless Child, who murders animals and sabotages her classmates’ work, filling their assignments with threats and rumors. Where Mia uses art to create, the Child uses it to kill, and the two of them play a sinister game of cat and mouse in the classroom and in the mysterious Building 101, which exists both in the real world and in a fantasy hatched by a dreamer whose awakening brings yet another dimension into focus. The Impossible Fairy Tale occupies a destabilizing, often inscrutable terrain where “dreams without origin pass by” and “sleep recedes,” where “No sentence is clear. Or unclear.” This transfixing experimental novel questions where sleep ends and books begin, a concept borrowed from the works of French writer Maurice Blanchot, and the atmosphere of nightmarish dread and penetrating weirdness recalls a David Lynch film. - Publishers Weekly


Korean short story writer Yujoo's debut novel paints a brutal picture of childhood within a metafictional frame.
In "an ordinary residential area in a city outside Seoul" in 1998, two 12-year-old girls keep journals for their school assignment. One, described as "lucky," has 72 German watercolor pencils and a sweater with a deer on it. Her name is Mia. The other, "simply luckless," carries scars and bruises beneath her clothes and is referred to starkly as the Child; "she forces the stinging, burning pain aside by creating greater pain." Their classmates practice acts of casual sadism and play "the fainting game" at the back of the classroom, choking each other. "The children exchange meaningful, significant looks, but there is neither meaning nor significance here....They merely tear the wings off butterflies, they merely kill chicks." Something compels the Child to break in after school hours and add sentences such as "I hate you," "I want to kill, too," to the journals of her classmates. Bewildered and disturbed, the teacher threatens to involve the police, spooking the perpetrator into trying to cover her tracks. The resultant tragedy, heavily foreshadowed, has a grim inevitability; "There is no sentence that can save you." But the ponderousness distances the reader from an emotional involvement in the characters' lives. In the second section the book becomes increasingly self-referential: "I can package a certain story as a dream and tell it that way. I can disguise my childhood, and as I disguise it I can make allusions, and as I reveal details about the allusions, I can make them appear fictitious, and in this way, I can deceive you all." The fictional Child returns to the author/narrator to re-enact a pivotal scene. "Am I alive or am I dead?" her character asks.
Elements of the narrative loop and repeat, not always successfully, but at its best and most ambitious, this is a novel about language and stories and the power of the written word. - Kirkus




“This début novel sketches the barbaric politics of elementary school with terrifying clarity. . . . The narrative turn is both exuberantly postmodern and in dead earnest.”―The New Yorker


“Grappling with topics such as childhood, bullying, and what it means to tell a story, The Impossible Fairy Tale is an impressively unique and challenging read that is well worth your while.”―BuzzFeed


“Han Yujoo . . . casts an uncanny cloak of dreams over a South Korean childhood. . . . Janet Hong, the translator, proves adept with both the skin-prickling horror of the novel’s first half, and the second half’s dark night of the literary soul.”―The Economist


“Eerie and haunting. . . . The beauty of Yujoo’s writing and her expert word play, incredibly well translated by Hong, strengthens the sense of horror and unease that grows throughout the novel.”―The Riveter


"A powerful and primal work, a deliberately constructed story that incorporates irrationality, fear and change, and holds the reader's attention throughout."―Star Tribune (Minneapolis)


“[Han’s] work is a victory of form that packs an emotional wallop. . . . With her shifts and slights of hand, Han Yujoo makes us question the narrative constructions we lean on to understand and move through our own worlds, leaving us in a state of unknowing that is both terrifying and exhilarating.”―The Gazette (Cedar Rapids)


“Bold and highly original. . . . The Impossible Fairy Tale . . . remains dreamy right till the end―with sharp and beautiful imagery involving snow, little objects like keys, a dog in a river. . . . Below the surface, in the nuances, empathy shines.”―On Art and Aesthetics


“A tour de force. . . . The world of The Impossible Fairy Tale is dreamlike, and the way that Yujoo carries the reader from scene to scene is both mind bendingly chaotic and strikingly beautiful.”―Heavy Feather Review

“Han pushes to the edge contextually but remains lucid in her own way; an ambitious novel for ambitious readers, and Han is a writer for those in the know to watch.”―Library Journal


“With minimal, yet meaningful, scenery and furniture―a classroom, a balcony, a green hair tie, a fountain pen, a paring knife―Yujoo weaves a haunting, yet spellbinding, tale about obsession, violence, psychosis and the immense and frightening force of an unquiet conscience.”
―Sara Baume


“Disturbing and visceral in its depiction of the savagery of childhood, yet uplifting in its reinvention of literary form. A novel of hypnotic language, page-turning suspense and mind-bending metafictional twists, The Impossible Fairy Tale is the most eerie and fearlessly experimental work I have encountered in recent years.”―Susan Barker


“Han Yujoo shows us what we wish we didn't have to see, what we wish we'd never seen, and what we think we see clearly but don't. She plumbs the depths of language to excavate the relationship of author to character, transforming a story about the fragility of innocence and the power of memory into an unsettling and exquisite meditation on art and cruelty. The Impossible Fairy Tale is a new kind of literary horror, as intellectual as it is transfixing.”―Sarah Gerard


“The Impossible Fairy Tale does to your head what turbulence on a plane does to your stomach. While your mind is being turned inside out, pay attention to yourself laughing before you start screaming. Listen out, too, for Maurice Blanchot, who is whispering in these pages. No doubt about it, Han Yujoo is a brave and intelligent writer.”―Lara Pawson


“Few Korean literary writers since the turn of the century rival Han Yujoo in her deep awareness of writing.”―The List       


The Impossible Fairytale pulls readers into its disorienting and brutal world, spinning a dark narrative of the nameless Child and her classmates. Later the perspective shifts into a meta-narrative—questioning and twisting ideas concerning language and the restraints of the novel as a literary form. Korean author Han Yujoo’s debut novel, translated by Janet Hong, The Impossible Fairytale is a wildly gripping page-turner, and ultimately a powerful yet unsettling read.
Through the narrative, Han explores the notion that violence is an ingrained part of society. Speaking at the Free Word Centre in London on July 10 at an author discussion hosted by the UK publisher, Titled Axis Press, Han talked of how “from a young age we are exposed to violence, it becomes normalized, a part of our everyday life…eating away at our minds.”
For the novel’s schoolchildren, particularly seen through the lives of the Child and the “lucky” Mia, violence has seeped into their everyday existence. In school, instead of the typical innocence of childhood games, the children display savagery, including brags about killing chicks bought from a street vendor in cruel ways or ripping the wings off butterflies. They kill birds by flinging marbles from slingshots, and then play a game where the boys throw the birds’ corpses at the squealing girls. Another favorite is the “fainting game,” where the children choke one another until someone passes out, revealing mixed feelings of horror and awe.
Adults are rarely present in such scenes, if at all, and it is clear that the children’s voices are not heard or valued in the adult world. The Child—who struggles with her identity and comes to school with fresh bruises and bloody fingers from ripped-off nails, signs of domestic abuse at home—has become invisible to those around her: “At school, she exists like a shadow. Or she has become a shadow and is absent.”
The Child’s way of finding her own voice is through writing her own coded journals, and by placing threats at the end of other children’s school journal entries in forged handwriting—“I despise you,” “I want to kill”— finally stirring up some concern from the teacher who threatens to take the class to the police station in an attempt to get a confession. The cruelty present in the Child’s life has regenerated inside of her, and throughout the narrative, she struggles with strong impulses, with the hypnotic, repetitive language growing stronger as the violence builds and sadly culminates in the chilling climax at the end of Part I.
While discussing her novel, Han talked about how in Korea, voices can be easily erased and a child’s voice in particular is not taken seriously. Almost no one is listening to the children, she says, and “it’s important for a child to have their own voice.” In the novel, we can see clearly what can happen when a child isn’t heard, and has been deemed invisible in their own world.
Just as the reader has reached the climax, Part II pans out to become a meta-narrative with a sense of immediate disorientation. The perspective shifts drastically as Han cleverly uses the latter part of the novel to question and reflect upon the Child’s actions, and to explore the inherent ideas behind writing, language and the inevitable restraints of literary forms.
Throughout the novel, language is mulled over, with the narrative often pausing to consider the phonetic quality of different words and sentences. Consider: “One, two, three. Three days later there may be new marks on her neck and the right side of her back. Mark, bark, dark, stark, she mumbles. She doesn’t mumble, it hurts, it hurts. Scar is bad. Because scar looks like scare. Ash is bad, too.”
Such interesting wordplay and experimental language presented many challenges tackled beautifully by translator Janet Hong who has retained the exquisite narrative and sense of play in the English translation. In the translator’s afterword, Hong refers to Anita Raja’s essay, “Translation as a Practice of Acceptance,” published in Asymptote, quoting how “the translator knows her own limits and yet, out of devotion, out of love, she is prepared to challenge them—or at least she chooses to try.” As a reader, I am grateful for Hong’s ability to push the limits, and for providing me the chance to come across such brave, compelling fiction I wouldn’t otherwise have had access to.
With her thrilling novel, Han Yujoo joins the growing movement of translated fiction written by female Korean authors. At the vanguard of this movement is Han Kang’s hyped and successful The Vegetarian, which won the Man Booker Prize last year, and also explored themes of violence within a relatively conservative Korean society. For readers who want to be challenged and have their expectations turned upside down, The Impossible Fairy Tale is one of the most oddly-riveting novels I have read in a long time. - Emma Holland
www.asymptotejournal.com/blog/2017/08/17/in-review-the-impossible-fairy-tale-by-han-yujoo/
     

A fresh and terrifying exploration of the ethics of art making and of the stinging consequences of neglect.

For a book full of so much mystery, the creative mission of Han Yujoo’s The Impossible Fairy Tale is remarkable for its author's openness about choices regarding how to tell stories, how an author reveals information, and the dissecting and peeling away of the layers of artifice inherent in the reading and writing of fiction.
Broken into two parts, Part I begins with Mia, an average twelve-year-old in an average neighborhood attending an average school in South Korea in the 1990s. She is concerned with moving up to middle school, getting a new pullover, and trying out a new haircut that her mother surely wouldn’t like. It is also noted that Mia’s name means both “beautiful child” and “lost child,” dual markers that make the reader want to pay attention to her even though she carries on like as one might expect of a schoolgirl. However, Part I soon alternates from Mia’s story to that of the Child—described as more monstrous than human—a peer who is not even given a name. The Child is mostly ignored by her fellow students and completely ignored by the few adults that populate the novel. Every day, the Child comes to class with a new wound, be it covered bruises or a fingernail yanked clean off, leaving behind a wounded, bloody nub. Even with her stark abuses and injuries, The Child is meant to be erased, both by her thoughts and the author’s.

She wishes she could be erased. But every time she tries to erase herself, she only grows darker. Every day, she grows darker. Enough for her body to gobble up her shadow. At school, she exists like a shadow. Or she has become a shadow and is absent.

The Child is able to lurk and ooze, yet she is not the only alarming aspect of this fifth-grade classroom. The adults, both parents and teachers, are always on the periphery, if not completely absent. The homeroom teacher is entirely oblivious to a horrid game the boys play in the back of the classroom called the fainting game, which entails choking each other until losing consciousness. The children also buy baby chicks from a street vendor with the intent of dropping them to their deaths from the roof of a building. Horror and violence permeate their lives and the narrative. Even happy Mia who likes her colored pencils and chatting with her desk mate, often perks up to explain that a fountain pen would be an ideal murder weapon, or so she once read in a detective novel.
The Child has a story too, but as she is constantly erasing herself, her actions throughout each chapter become more vividly heightened. With an unknown identity, the reasons for her behavior are frightening and enigmatic. After school hours, she sneaks back into the classroom and writes extra lines in the other students’ journals: “I hate you;” “Park Yeongwu killed the chick;” “I want to kill, too.” To the Child, she is revealing the children’s secrets, because otherwise the explicit thoughts written down for the privy of their homeroom teacher are generally mundane. When the teacher reads these addenda, he is horrified and threatens to get the police involved if no one steps forward to claim responsibility. In a world where the adults do not notice children strangling each other on a daily basis, it becomes even more horrifying that a generally benign transgression is what the teacher focuses on and takes seriously.
The bluntness of the violence is shocking, but somehow a natural part of the world that the author has built. It propels the narrative forward without ever quite normalizing it. The book creeps into the realm of horror reminding the reader that fairy tales were not originally stories of fluffy princesses and riches, but tales of nefarious sharp-toothed monsters, and atrocious and brutal outcomes. Part I ends with a provocative, but somehow anticipated ending.
In Part II, Han plays with a more experimental narrative, and while it does not have the same grounded feeling as Part I, the examination of storytelling is at the forefront. Here the narrative voice moves to first person, a mostly unknown narrator probing the events leading up to the shocking end of Part I. It's this narrator who questions what it is to write, how a story is told, and how an author manipulates the reader through the artifice of fiction.

Don’t be deceived by these words. I can package a certain story as a dream and tell it that way. I can disguise my childhood, and as I disguise it I can make allusions, and as I reveal details about allusions, I can make them appear fictitious, and in this way, I can deceive you all.

Explicitly name-checked with admiration by the narrator of Part II is Maurice Blanchot’s Death Sentence, a short work about the inability to write a story until time has passed. Death Sentence acts as a sort of key for reading the more opaque second-half of the novel. Bits of Part I are re-written and magnified with the idea of reading and writing as a shared experience. It’s as if the author is asking the reader, what do you expect from a story?
Janet Hong's translation retains Han's idiosyncratic play, her sense of mystery in language and thought. This play is so important to the project of the novel, wherein Han rewrites and reiterates details, words, and phrases, and scenarios. She is at her best in the concrete details of the novel, like the repeated images of the Child’s nubby, painful fingers, and Mia’s beloved expensive colored pencils. Less successful are those passages where the author is emphasizing a connection between an abstractraction—for example, a character’s dream—and the folded pathways of written language. During these less successful moments of recursive language, Han's constructs can hinder the momentum of her story-telling, occasionally even slipping into sloppy lyricism: “Brick you don’t look at brick me. Brick words don’t remember brick words. Brick dawn, brick morning, brick evening, brick night.” In these moments it can be difficult to unpack the author's intent. But that’s fine. The Impossible Fairy Tale is gripping in its horror, making commonplace environments completely unsettling, and the examination of story-telling itself, a curious endeavor. - Ariell Cacciola
https://www.wordswithoutborders.org/book-review/the-impossible-fairy-tale-by-han-yujoo


Sometimes, I like having my brain stretched when reading a book: something to get stuck into, to make me think. But there are limits. I don’t like being made to feel inadequate. And that’s the way I feel after putting down The Impossible Fairy Tale.
Leave on one side the first two chapters, the first of which is only nine words long in its English translation, which describe a dog swimming or floating down a river. I have no notion what bearing they have on the rest of the book, though one thing I learned from the London book launch at the Free Word Centre is that maybe there’s some wordplay involved: the central character of the novel is simply known as The Child (애). If we go from Child to This Child (그 애) and contract the two words into one we get 개: Dog. So “Child” and “Dog” are somehow connected. But whether this information is useful to the rest of the book I’m not sure.
Having emerged the other side of those two chapters we launch into a fast-paced story which lasts until about 60% of the way through the book. This main story immediately absorbs you and pulls you along with it: a tale set in a classroom in a regular school, the sort of classroom that you can visualise from your Korean movie-watching. It feels familiar, but the people who inhabit this classroom are anything but.
We start by focusing on one girl, Mia, who is deemed to be fortunate because she has two fathers that compete for her love and affection by showering her with gifts, though her description as “fortunate” seems to be loaded with irony or foreboding. Then the focus shifts to another girl, a girl who seems to shrink anonymously into the background – to such an extent that she is known throughout the book only as The Child. At one point you are given a hint has to what the initial letters of her name might be, but in a revealing chapter which lists out all the children in the class and gives a paragraph or two about the past or future lives of each of them, there is no name which could represent The Child. She is seemingly invisible even to the author in that particular chapter.
The Child suffers all sorts of physical abuse from her parents who are completely absent from the narrative: the only reason we know they are present, lurking menacingly in the background, is from the wounds and bruises that scar The Child’s body. The Child simply regards this abuse as part of her daily life experience. But perhaps as a result she is desensitised to violence and all too able to inflict suffering on other creatures. The classroom itself is a place of violence: the rougher students like to play a game that involves strangling each other; and a poor kid with learning difficulties is mercilessly picked on.
For some unspecified reason, perhaps to emerge from her invisibility, The Child decides to make her mark, almost literally, on her classmates, by sneaking into the classroom at night and adding weird sentences to the journals which their homeroom teacher requires them to maintain. This prank triggers a sequence of events that has tragic consequences. At one point The Child tries to contain matters by stealing the journals and hiding them, but that only makes things worse. The story hurtles to its violent conclusion.
And then we suddenly then have a complete shift of viewpoint. The focus turns to the author of the novel with some bizarre dream sequences and some semi-autobiographical episodes in which the novel’s author engages with The Child in the main story, albeit several years later. In this second half, again it is a journal that seems to be the key that might potentially unlock the secrets of the narrative; but somehow the secrets are out of reach. What is the significance, for example, of the two dream sequences? In the first of these, the author is caught in an ever-intensifying snowstorm and is in search of the most perfectly formed snowflake. In the second, she is in a mysterious world made of brick in which she debates about the most beautiful word in existence with an argumentative brick horse.
The power of the written word is emphasised by a macabre fact that the children share between themselves in the first half of the book: that a fountain pen, if dropped from a height at the right angle onto a person’s head, is capable of killing someone. A pen can kill. Words added to a journal can prompt a chain of destruction.
The written word, for a child who is invisible, ignored and living on the margins, is possibly the only means of communication. But words need to be used carefully: The Child needs to write her own journal in her own private code to disguise the tortures dished out by her parents and avoid further punishment. Words, in the hands of Han Yujoo, take on their own life as onomatopoeic sequences generating playful but nonsensical ideas. - Philip Gowman
https://londonkoreanlinks.net/2017/11/13/book-review-han-yujoo-the-impossible-fairy-tale/


The dichotomies of childhood—children’s capacity for both guileless love and extreme cruelty—make our earliest years ripe material for storytelling; fairy tales, in particular, have long traded on the contradictions of youth: Hansel and Gretel narrowly escaping an evil witch’s clutches only to burn her alive in her own oven, Red Riding Hood fending off the appetite of a ravenous wolf disguised as her grandmother before filling his stomach with stones. It’s through this lens the reader approaches The Impossible Fairy Tale (214 pages; Graywolf Press; translated by Janet Hong), the first novel from Korean author Han Yujoo and her first work to be translated into English.
The book opens on a bleak grade-school world (“Do you know you can kill someone with a fountain pen?” is one of the first lines spoken) and quickly establishes the novel’s central parallel: the charmed life of the angelic Mia—who wants for nothing and receives lavish gifts from both her biological father and her mother’s paramour (as the novel opens it’s a set of seventy-two German watercolor pencils, perhaps a nod to the Germanic origins of the Grimm fairy tales)—presented in sharp relief against a classmate’s known only as the Child, an unfortunate girl who experiences a constant torrent of abuse from her mother: “She wishes she could be erased. But every time she tries to erase herself, she only grows darker.”

The Child’s nightmarish existence is also situated among traditional Korean folk tales, such as the superstition that one should not clip their nails at night lest the shavings be eaten by mice, who will then steal one’s form: “She sometimes wishes that mice or ants would eat her nail clippings, just like in the old stories, and transform into her image…and become her and share her pain receptors.” Mia and the Child become destined for confrontation when the Child, motivated seemingly only by inconsolable rage, sneaks into the school at night and adds morose messages into her classmates’ student diaries: “I despise you,” “I hate you,” “I want to kill, too.” As the days pass and the teacher searches for a culprit, no one possibly suspects the Child precisely because she is given so little thought (“No, the teacher doesn’t think about the Child at all”). Tensions mount as it becomes increasingly clear the Child’s story can only end in tragedy.
Knowing how invested we must be in the fate of the Child, Han Yujoo continually throws the reader off guard by drawing attention to the artifice of fiction writing itself; in the midst of the Child and Mia’s schoolyard interactions, lines such as “Without conflict, there is no story” and “We must continue with Mia’s story. Look at Mia” remind us that, no matter how vivid these characters’ pain may seem, they are merely the products of an omniscient author carefully arranging each page. Yujoo’s attempt to unnerve, to prevent us from ever feeling as though we’re on solid ground, reaches its apex when, in the middle of the novel, the narrative pauses so Yujoo can share several pages of anti-fairy tales—dismal vignettes of disappointment in the lives of characters never to be seen again, single paragraph chronicles of car crashes, stage collapses, schoolyard brawls, and child abuse.
The Impossible Fairy Tale excels when Yujoo provides every drab detail of this dreary world, one in which students play “the fainting game”—mock attempts to choke each other out—as soon as their teacher leaves the room, and “As always the potted plants on the windowsill complain of hunger and thirst.” When Mia goes over to a friend’s house after school to watch a Japanese anime on television, the show’s fantastical science-fiction imagery becomes a metaphor for the children’s anguish: “A planet is being destroyed. It collapses. Everything is collapsing…The citizens of the planet that is being destroyed say over and over again, as though they’re singing a round, that everything is collapsing.” The word “collapsing” soon functions as a motif in the novel long after Mia and her friend have turned off the television.
A surprise reversal during the book’s final third brings the meta aspects to the fore in a manner not unlike Italo Calvino’s work, and may frustrate those who’ve become invested in the Child’s fate. To be fair, the author herself appears to count herself among that number: much of the climax of The Impossible Fairy Tale serves as an exploration of a writer’s moral responsibilities to her long-suffering creations, particularly when that suffering involves a grave social issue like child abuse. “A kind of guilt dogged me,” the narrator—who may or may not be Han Yujoo —admits as she orchestrates the life and death of these “luckless” grade school students.
It may seem cruel for a writer to engender a reader to a character as tortured and alone as a Child, only to glaringly spotlight her fictitious nature—but such is the nature of dreams. With The Impossible Fairy Tale, Han Yujoo has crafted a novel where the deepest recesses of the subconscious are conflated with childhood memories, futuristic anime, and folk tales to express the particular unreality of a writer’s life. The result is a fine book, and one sure to be enjoyed by those who don’t require a bread-crumb trail leading to a tidy plot resolution. - Zack Ravas
www.zyzzyva.org/2017/03/20/nightmarish-existence-of-the-child-the-impossible-fairy-tale-by-han-yujoo/


“After waking from my dream, I came back to reality. But my reality remains fictional… The most beautiful snow crystal in the world and the most beautiful word in the world still don’t exist. They don’t command any meaning. I think of the words I haven’t discovered yet. But that’s impossible.”
I first discovered The Impossible Fairy Tale last year while flipping through the Graywolf Press catalog and was immediately impatient for its release. It sounded exactly like something I would love: two young girls, one lucky and spoiled and the other luckless and invisible, and a writer confronted by her own creations. I was expecting something a bit dark, but lyrically beautiful and deep.
Yet after a month of tedious reading, I’m forced to admit that I have never before read a book that has left me feeling so very conflicted.
At the beginning of the novel, Han spins a dark tale of two girls at the threshold between childhood and their approaching teenage years. Mia is a “lucky” girl because she is pretty, innocent, spoiled, and has two fathers. She is a girl who has every single color in the world. The Child, on the other hand, is so luckless that nobody even knows her name. If Mia is colorful, then the Child is darkness and anger. One day, the Child sneaks into their classroom after hours and adds twisted and violent writing to each student’s journal, an act which sets off a swift unraveling of her nerves and reason.
In retrospect, I enjoyed this first part of the novel the most. Han does a fantastic job of tapping into prepubescent angst. She uses the Child as the magnifying glass through which she reveals the violence and anger inherent in children of that age, no matter how sweet or friendly they appear to be. One boy wants to kill a newly hatched chick; Mia’s best friend steals from her. Best of all, Han fleshes out each character so that you can see why they behave the way they do. The child who is bullied at home becomes vicious with his peers while the girl taking care of her elderly grandmother takes to lying. Even if they are only mentioned in a paragraph or two, each character has a multidimensionality that lends a realness and relatability to what is otherwise a very surreal novel.
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It was in the second half of the novel, however, where things started to fall apart for me. Rather than continuing to follow the two girls, we instead dip into the mind and dreams of the female writer trying to write Mia and the Child’s story.  We spend a few chapters in this woman’s dreams, a few chapters in her writing, and a few in “reality” until they all start to blend together. The Child comes to visit her and, together with the writer, we begin to question: what makes a character fictional? How much control does a writer have over the story she writes or the characters she creates?
I feel that I should first clarify that there is no contesting Han’s skill. One moment she’s waxing deep and metaphorical about a writer’s process and another she dips us into the writer’s mindset through a series of short, almost erratic sentences. To encompass so many different styles of narration in a single novel is a quite the technical feat.
However, this ever-shifting narration did not work for me. If anything, I found the constantly changing tone and narration rather jarring. There were moments of pure poetry, where Han questioned the true role of the writer and the relationship she has with her characters. But it almost felt as though the novel itself had multiple personalities as each chapter jumped from insightful to spasmodic.
And although the idea of a writer confronting her process and creations was one of the elements that drew me to this novel in the first place, there were many instances in which the book felt too aware of itself. Even in the first half of the novel, there were moments where the narrator would refer to what the reader had not yet learned yet, a sort of break in the fourth wall. There was constant allusion to the author’s intention and what Mia and the Child “could know” or “would experience” which I found really pulled me out of the flow of the story. Furthermore, although the characters were realistic and could easily have triggered a reader’s empathy, I never found myself able to get close to the characters. I felt removed from what I was reading, almost like trying to interact with someone through a triple-paned glass.
In sum, The Impossible Fairy Tale was not the book for me. While there are a few moments of real insight and beauty, the jarring abruptness of the rest of the novel prevented me from enjoying it as much as I hoped I would. However, if you are interested in Korean fiction and want a very experimental take on the relationship between an author and their work, you may want to consider picking this up to form your own opinion. - Marisa Jue
https://www.aprilmag.com/2017/06/21/book-review-the-impossible-fairy-tale-by-yujoo-han/

Han Yujoo was born in Seoul in 1982. Her debut novel   The Impossible Fairytale  is her first work    translated into English, published by Graywolf in the USA and by Tilted Axis Press in the UK. She is also the author of the short-story collections   To the Moon, Book of Ice, and My Left Hand the King, My Right Hand the King’s Scribe. She won the Hankook Ilbo Literary Award in 2009. She is also a translator, is an active member of the experimental group Rue, and also runs her own micro-press, Oulipo Press, focusing on publishing experimental fiction.