Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: NAMED AN NPR GREAT READ OF 2018

Distinguished for his talents as a rat killer, the nameless protagonist of Hye-young Pyun's City of Ash and Red is sent by the extermination company he works for on an extended assignment in C, a country descending into chaos and paranoia, swept by a contagious disease, and flooded with trash. No sooner does he disembark than he is whisked away by quarantine officials and detained overnight. Isolated and forgotten, he realizes that he is stranded with no means of contacting the outside world. Still worse, when he finally manages to reach an old friend, he is told that his ex-wife's body was found in his apartment and he is the prime suspect. Barely managing to escape arrest, he must struggle to survive in the streets of this foreign city gripped with fear of contamination and reestablish contact with his company and friends in order to clear his reputation.

But as the man's former life slips further and further from his grasp, and he looks back on his time with his wife, it becomes clear that he may not quite be who he seems. From the bestselling author of The Hole, City of Ash and Red is an apocalyptic account of the destructive impact of fear and paranoia on people's lives as well as a haunting novel about a man’s loss of himself and his humanity.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: First, read this:

...the health inspector placed the thermometer directly against the man's right ear. An electric hum buzzed in his ear like an alarm. He barked out a loud cough as if in response to the sound, and the health inspector jumped back.
The inspections were due to the recent outbreak. An illness had been spreading fast, from country zero to most of the rest of the world, like fire jumping from roof to roof. No one knew exactly how it was spreading, treatment was still in the developmental stages, infection rates were high, and there was talk of a growing feud among countries to secure the limited supply of vaccines. And yet, luckily, there'd been few fatalities so far. The man figured the news back home was right: no matter how strong the virus was, he had nothing to worry about as long as he kept his hands clean.

This isn't going to hit the same way in 2023 as it did in 2018.

The unnervingly prescient pandemic thing aside, the story rings its tocsins of warning louder about the hazards of global totalitarianism turned up to eleven in a world with Modi, Xi, and Kim sharing a continent...not to mention Putin squatting just to their north.

Again, setting the essential-to-the-story geopolitics aside, the truly horrifying and visceral descriptions of the unnamed exterminator's environment during his quarantine (presaged in the above quote) and subsequent descent-cum-escape into the utter devastation and foulness of the literal, as well as figurative, underworld beneath the foreign city (whose language he can't speak) that his bosses have sent him to to ply his exterminator's trade are intensely and economically presented. There is no wasted veriage in this book.

There is also no memorable character. The two have always seemed to me to go hand-in-hand. In many ways this is intentional...no one in a totalitarian state should stand out as a memorable individual, or else...but it ended up feeling to my readerly sensibilities a bit foreshortened, lacking in explorable depth.

Accepting that this is almost certainly intentional and not a lack of ability (see The Hole below), I had to acknowledge the intended effect of alienation was simply not to my taste and rate the read a full four stars. ( )

Perhaps the translation is to blame, but the writing and story felt completely rudimentary. ( )

City of Ash and Red is a Korean story that strikes fear and uneasiness into the reader. The unnamed lead character and narrator works for an extermination company. He's not the best employee but gets to work at the big office in Country C. Countries and cities are represented by single letters which are not shorthand but signify places unknown to the reader. The reader will not think that country C is North Korea, Poland, or Canada; it is someplace the reader has never been. There is a sense of being lost and to compound that feeling the character also feels lost and disoriented. He loses all contact with his home country. He also learns he is suspected in the murder of his ex-wife. The book takes the reader on a dark, twisting course. In a city where trash piles high, rats thrive, and swirling mists of sprays that are supposed to control the spread of an epidemic cover everything a foreigner must find his way out or in.


Translator Sora Kim-Russell does an outstanding job in translating the story to English while keeping the original feel and intent of the story. Horror seems to have different flavors in different cultures. Part of the stories appeal is that is outside of the Western or American norm.
( )

I picked this up from the New Fiction section at the library for WIT month--and finally got to it a month late.

This novel is strange. It's a little dystopian and a little not. The narrator seems reliable and seems not. He is unnamed, so the text is somewhat awkward to read (he, his, he, his, ad nauseum), but I did get used to it. I also can't tell if that is because of the translation, and if that actually works better in Korean.

A man works for an extermination company in Country A. He receives a transfer to the home office in Country C--he took it because why not? Maybe he will move up in the company. He's divorced with no kids, so the move doesn't really matter.

When he arrives, he finds both the office and his apartment are in a section of the city that is dangerous, the heart of a new epidemic, where trash is dumped everywhere and trash fires burn. His stuff is stolen. He knows few phone numbers. Few people are out. It stinks. There are fumigation trucks everywhere. And his life spirals out of control before he settles down again.

At first he seems very reliable--though the narration style is so awkward, so maybe that is a clue? IN the end though, I was wondering if anything at all was how he perceived/told his story. I also wonder if this is actually meant as an allegory for something in Korean history/current events that I don't recognize. ( )

Employee of a pesticide manufacturer is sent to work temporarily at the home office in another country, where he can barely hold a simple conversation in the local language. But, never mind. They don't need him to come to the office right away in any case. In fact, he is confined to his apartment in the midst of an epidemic in an island part of the capital city where the garbage is piled high enough to use as a trampoline. Certainly it is fair to call this novel Kafka-esque, but it doesn't manage quite the same effect. As the novel progresses, we see flashbacks into the protagonist's past, mostly focused on his deteriorating relationship and separation from his wife and his trying experiences on the job, especially after his co-workers found he was the one selected to work at the home office, typically a stepping stone to becoming a branch manager. Meanwhile, in his new not-so-home, things keep getting worse and worse. But you'll have to experience that for yourself. This is a fairly quick, easy read, but you may find yourself wondering at the end just what it was all about and if there is any greater lesson you have missed. I have read two South Korean novels recently, and they are both just plain weird. I'm sure it isn't that all South Korean novels are weird, just that those are the ones I'm attracted to. ( )