[tw] Death Is the Only Excitement in the Modern World

photo: www.goodreads.com

The big city of Seoul pulses. Cars zip along freeways, people rush to and from work, and buildings are always open, no matter the hour, but underneath all of this thrumming life, a quieter, more sinister energy pulses like a dark star.

It's this energy that the unnamed narrator of I Have the Right to Destroy Myself exploits. He spends his days combing through magazines and newspapers to scout clients. At night, he looks for clients a different way: by listening to calls from strangers who tell him their problems: domestic abuse, bad grades, etc. Within just a few minutes, he understands exactly who each caller is: what they want, what they fear, and whether or not they want to kill themselves.

Eventually, he hand-picks a few clients and helps them commit suicide. His plan is to write about these instances "playing God" and send them to a publisher before leaving Korea and living abroad. His grandest story revolves around two brothers, C and K, respectively, and the woman they both love, Se-yeon.

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Because the story almost feels surreal and we see the characters through an unreliable narrator, we don't get a rich understanding of the characters. Few details about their personal lives, besides their professions, are offered. Se-yeon and the other woman, Mimi, also feel more like stand-in silhouettes than fully developed characters. However, this isn't to say that they aren't complex, or that the issues they're grappling with are simple.

Rather, this novel examines the numbness and boredom of modern life in big cities, loneliness, control, and the dark compulsions running through human nature even when love and purpose are present.

Parts are alternately heartbreaking and chilling. There's a moment when K shreds the posters of cars and this physical destruction of his dreams is quite wrenching.

In another, the narrator's calm commitment to helping others achieve death seems quite psychopathic, quietly directing the moves his clients will need to take to gas themselves, overdose, or slit their own wrists.

Despite the darkness throbbing through this novel, there are also feeble calls to the tenacity of life, and people who continually hang on, like people who, no matter how tired they are, can't make themselves fall asleep.

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The premise for this novel was quite unique (based on my past reading experiences), and the narrator was both chilling and weirdly understandable. The dreamlike flow and dark take on realistic big city life earned this novel a:

7/10 📕