Almond (2020) by Sohn Won-pyung

Korean author Won-pyung Sohn

Book Review

Almond (2020)

by Sohn Won-pyung

     There is no denying the momentum of Korean culture in the international market for popular culture.  You can start with the popular music:  Any nation that can successfully export a boy band to the rest of the globe has proven that it belongs in the top tiers of local-international cultures.   Then you can turn to Korean impact in peak television and film, where Korean work has won awards at the highest levels in the United States and also created the kind of cultural phenomenon one rarely identifies with foreign cultural products.   A similar kind of flood hasn't happened in the higher echelons of international literature, where Korean authors are still marketed by independent publishers and less popular with the general audience than their music and film/tv counterparts. 

    Almond, which was a hit in Korea in 2016, and Sohn Won-pyung's first novel, is about Yun-jae, an almost orphan who is neuro-divergent in the sense that he can't process emotions, something that we would call being "on the spectrum" in the United States, the spectrum ranging from Autism to Asperger's.  Autism doesn't appear to be a known phenomenon in the Korea of this novel- the title refers to the explanation Yun-jae is given for his condition, that his amygdala is too small, like an almond size.   It means something that Almond arrives in English translation via HarperCollins, that is at least a step in the right direction in terms of elevating Korean language literary fiction in translation.  Almond certainly left me asking the question whether Korea knows what Autism is or if that concept simply doesn't exist in Korea.