Tuesday, May 10, 2022

May flowers: Violets

Violets
by Kyung-sook Shin
translated by Anton Hur
LGBTQ, Historical, Korea | Published: 2022 | Goodreads | my rating: 5

We join San in 1970s rural South Korea, a young girl ostracised from her community. She meets a girl called Namae, and they become friends until one afternoon changes everything. Following a moment of physical intimacy in a minari field, Namae violently rejects San, setting her on a troubling path of quashed desire and isolation.

We next meet San, aged twenty-two, as she starts a job in a flower shop. There, we are introduced to a colourful cast of characters, including the shop's mute owner, the other florist Su-ae, and the customers that include a sexually aggressive businessman and a photographer, who San develops an obsession for. Throughout, San's moment with Namae lingers in the back of her mind.


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CLASSIC SCENE:

A Room With A View
by E.M. Forester
Classics, Historical, Romance, Italy | Published: 2000 (first 1908) | Goodreads

At the same moment the ground gave way, and with a cry she fell out of the wood. Light and beauty enveloped her. She had fallen on to a little open terrace, which was covered with violets from end to end.

“Courage!” cried her companion, now standing some six feet above. “Courage and love.”

She did not answer. From her feet the ground sloped sharply into view, and violets ran down in rivulets and streams and cataracts, irrigating the hillside with blue, eddying round the tree stems collecting into pools in the hollows, covering the grass with spots of azure foam. But never again were they in such profusion; this terrace was the well-head, the primal source whence beauty gushed out to water the earth.

Standing at its brink, like a swimmer who prepares, was the good man. But he was not the good man that she had expected, and he was alone.

George had turned at the sound of her arrival. For a moment he contemplated her, as one who had fallen out of heaven. He saw radiant joy in her face, he saw the flowers beat against her dress in blue waves. The bushes above them closed. He stepped quickly forward and kissed her. -Chapter 6


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WATCH: on Netflix
Violet Evergarden (2018)
tv mini series Stars: Yui Ishikawa, Erika Harlacher, Raissa Bueno
Animation, Drama, Fantasy, Japan | imdb

In the aftermath of a great war, Violet Evergarden, a young female ex-soldier, gets a job at a writers' agency and goes on assignments to create letters that can connect people.

SOMETHING TASTY:
 
Imagination Designs
Images from: Lovelytocu