外面是夏天

What is this book about?

Kim Ae-ran's fourth story collection, published in Korea in 2017, contains seven stories whose protagonists are mostly in the middle of losing something: a child, a father, a job that kept up appearances, a language in which to say what they mean. They live in semi-basement flats, old apartments, and exam-room cubicles in Seoul and Gyeonggi Province, keeping up the surface of ordinary life while the loss has already happened.

Why read it?

Kim writes loss without the crying scene: she writes the errands that must continue afterwards — renewing a lease, returning a purchase, filling in a form, buying a child shoes one size too big. Her sentences are clean and funny and almost never sentimental, so the grief lands without warning. She also writes about a subject often attempted and rarely got right: young people who came to Seoul from the provinces and live half underground.

Core Ideas

• Loss is not an event but a continuing condition, and ordinary chores are how it becomes visible.
• Respectability is the most expensive thing a poor person owns; keeping it often costs more than losing it.
• Poverty of language and poverty of means arrive together: some situations do not yet have words.
• Imagination is not an escape from suffering but the capacity that lets a person remain a person.

What questions does this book try to answer?

• After losing what mattered most, why does a person keep up the surface of ordinary life?
• In a fiercely competitive society, how much of an ordinary person's failure is really his own?

Who should read it?

For readers of contemporary Korean fiction, and for anyone going through a loss. The seven stories are short enough to read one at a time; if your loss is recent, be prepared before you start.

How to Read It

With a cold yet tender touch, Kim writes the reality of ordinary East Asians for whom it is summer outside and winter within — the source list's reading. This is a Korean book, usually titled Summer Outside in English. The seven stories stand alone — try the title story first, then the opening one. Her prose is light, so read slowly and do not chase plot. The collection won Korea's 48th Dong-in Literary Award in 2017.