Its twin subjects are homophobia and class disadvantage, which Kim Hye-jin links on nearly every page. They demand our full attention, and then they earn it.Ĭoncerning My Daughter is a tiny, blunt book. All three books are tough - and all three are completely consuming. Kim Hye-jin's Concerning My Daughter, translated from the Korean by Jamie Chang, demands a taxing quantity of empathy from its readers and protagonist alike the Brazilian literary master João Gilberto Noll's erotic odyssey Hugs and Cuddles, translated from by Edgar Garbelotto, shatters any prudery or sexual squeamishness readers may bring to the book and the Cuban writer Jorge Enrique Lage's cyberpunk Freeway: La Movie, translated by Lourdes Molina, is so disorienting that it stretches our ideas of narrative. None of the novels below pretend for a moment to be easy. If an author asks a lot of us, we get to ask a lot of that author, too. Doing so generates a sense of investment it also heightens our expectations.
When a book declares itself a challenge right away, its readers get to make the conscious choice to rise to the occasion. But gentle, subtle novels are far more common than ones that take the opposite tactic, announcing their difficulty or their defiance from the very first page - a brave strategy, and one that creates a uniquely exciting relationship between author and audience. Many readers, critics, and editors see delicacy, especially on the thematic front, as a sign of quality and challenge, which it frequently is. Subtlety gets a lot of praise in the realm of literature.
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