tl;dr

While I can’t say I appreciated the full extent of this book (or entirely understood it), I’m delighted it exists.

opening remarks

Megan AM (aka couch to moon) said in a recent blog post that we (the SF community) should get off our arse and read Unbearable Splendor by Sun Yung Shin.  Well, here is me metaphorically getting off my arse.

knee-jerk observations

It has charts (though as Sun Yung Shin points out this graph is not hers but instead borrowed from Masahiro Mori’s essay, “The Uncanny Valley.“)

Amongst the opaque prose and poetry I have learnt about black holes and, more interestingly, Korea’s creation myth:

I do like the idea of every word uttered in a person’s life representing a single, unique sentence.

I have also discovered, with the help of Sun Yung Shin, that Asterion was another name for the Minotaur.

I can’t say I entirely understand what Sun Yung Shin is aiming to achieve with Unbearable Splendour but it is a book that wears its pop culture – both ancient and contemporary – on its sleeve.  There are references to Blade Runner, Antigone and Alien including quotes from these sources.

I think you could spend many hours and many pages unpacking these three paragraphs.

The final story in the book – because, yes, it dawned on me that this isn’t a novel but a collection of stories and poems – draws on the themes threaded through the previous pieces: folklore, popular culture, cyborgs and machine intelligence; the question of identity and self.  It’s not a retelling of Pinocchio, that would be far too conventional and ordinary, but it is a creation story as a wooden baby is born. Like the rest of the novel, it is both brilliant and bewildering.

The Gist Of It

What to make of Unbearable Splendour, how to speak about it in a manner that is coherent and insightful?  I’m not sure I can; I don’t think I’m up to the task.  I was on the backfoot from the outset when I thought I was reading a slim novel/novella, when in fact it was a collection of stories and poetry.  My less than astute thoughts early on (see above) are reflective of this confusion.

Anyway, even if I’d gone in eyes wide open, I would have faltered.  At the best of times, I struggle with poetry, when it’s this experimental and opaque, I can only let it wash over me and hope that residual metaphors and verse fragments leave an impression.  I was on firmer ground with the prose, but even here the bittiness of it, the shift between commentary and narrative, the grab-bag of scientific concepts, pop culture references and literary criticism both frustrated and excited.

The collection is at its best when Shin merges the story of the Minotaur inspired by Borges or where she interrogates Antigone.  There’s quite a bit of that going around with Kamila Shamsie’s brilliant reimagining of the play in her novel Home Fire and Ann Carson’s Antigonick, an experimental rendition of Antigone that I recently heard on The Organist podcast.  In the case of Shin, she considers whether Antigone was the first cyborg, a creature greater than the sum of its parts.

Throughout the collection, there is so much to unpack including Shin’s views on identity, self-realisation, the immigrant story, the mutable nature of language.  There are times when the prose is sublime, jaw-droppingly beautiful and there are times when it made little sense to me, where Shin’s play on words, her verse left me perplexed.  I think that’s the point though.  Not everything should be spoon-fed and what resonates with one – as it did with Megan AM (read her fantastic, astute review of the book on Strange Horizons) – will have little impact on another.

I admit I’m not fair on this book by falling back on the tired old criticism that it’s a difficult read.  At the very least, though, I can thank Coffee House Press who make it their mission to introduce readers to works as boundary-pushing and unconventional as Unbearable Splendor.