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Korea in 1996, takes out an ad in the newspaper containing nothing but a phone number and a promise: “We listen to your problems.” When people call, he quickly assesses the depth of their troubles. But instead of offering the standard advice—seek counseling, stick it out, everything will get better—he plies them with more radical solutions. He tells women abused by their fathers to run away or, if unwilling, to kill their aggressors. “But I don’t encourage murder,” he writes. “…I only want to draw out morbid desires, imprisoned deep in the unconscious.”
The plan, then, is to take the callers on as “clients,” and slowly walk them toward killing themselves. Over the course of this brief novel, the narrator assists in the suicides of two women, both of whom were inextricably tied to two brothers.
Often, when we wish a story would continue after finishing a book, we mean it as an accolade: The story was so rich, we could imagine being with these characters for much longer. In this case, we mean it as a demerit. There isn’t enough story here to accomplish all the things Kim wants to do: mine the loneliness of urban living, explore the disconnect between men and women, and investigate the validity of suicide as a cultural response. Kim also squeezes in a metafictional indulgence, as the narrator discusses writing this novel about two suicide cases. It’s an unnecessary distraction, one that only detracts from the moody tone of the book.
Kim’s greatest achievement is the creation of an ominous, numinous narrator who seems a natural offspring of contemporary, uninterested urban existence. The anonymous protagonist had us hooked from the beginning. The writing is also often spectacular, reminding us of the sparse but beautiful prose of Haruki Murakami. When one of the brothers—whose girlfriend is eventually “assisted” by the narrator—drives his bullet taxi through the streets of Seoul at night, the city’s neon and darkness is evocatively captured.
Unfortunately, as Destroy Myself spins in its various directions, often into half-explored territory, there simply aren’t enough pages to allow the novel to coalesce into what it should be. —Jonathan Messinger
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