The Internet in general, and social media in particular, have deeply altered how people view themselves and each other. While styling themselves to appear successful, social media users ironically take other people’s carefully curated timelines as windows into reality: things to aspire to or envy. Culture, upbringing, and other factors weigh into how this algorithmic misconception plays into one’s life. In A MIRROR FOR THE BLIND: Reflections of a Digital Seoul, first-time novelist Jeong Mu offers keen insight into South Korea during the Internet age.
Interest in Korean entertainment and media has skyrocketed in recent years, but A MIRROR FOR THE BLIND is not the stuff of K-dramas. While certain aspects of education and employment are different, many things are painfully similar between the East and West. This is demonstrated through the eyes of several office workers in their 20s and 30s. Kim Youngbaek is a brilliant young man who pursued philosophy, but finds himself dissatisfied with his position at one of Korea’s biggest companies. His friends are doing well for themselves, as a programmer and a civil servant respectively, flaunting their impressive work accomplishments on the business-centric social media app SCR33N. What Youngbaek doesn’t know is that both friends are just as discontent as he is, for reasons buried deep under their carefully curated content. Meanwhile, even the one shot at happiness he does have—his engagement to the highly successful Jungyoon—hangs precariously in the balance. In the background, a self-help guru calling himself “VAL-YOU” attempts to win hearts and minds with expensive personalized lessons.
While the action of A MIRROR FOR THE BLIND is very down-to-earth, it’s also extremely insightful. The author Mu digs deep into the “why” of each character. Some of their motivations are universal: the dopamine of a positive social media interaction, the sinking feeling that no amount of money is ever “enough,” and so on. Meanwhile, others dig keenly into Korea’s own culture and society. Through the characters’ thoughts and actions, Mu posits that South Korea didn’t so much modernize itself as trade one form of hierarchy for another: one that’s just as internalized and ingrained, despite appearing more progressive.
This translation (by Mark Allen Brazeal) is largely a solid one, making rare usage of footnotes for Korean slang. The one mild issue with this translation is in a structural difference between novels of the East and West: that is, Western novels tend to more regularly identify who is speaking in back-and-forth conversation to maintain clarity, whereas Eastern novels do this far less. There are several scenes in which it might have been wise to make this addition for Western audiences, as it may be difficult for them to keep track of three different characters. However, that’s not an issue with the book itself: merely a cultural difference that was not accounted for.
A MIRROR FOR THE BLIND is slow-moving, but it’s never boring. The pacing fits the rhythm of office life: somehow both fast and slow, both tense and dragging. As the point of view rotates through the cast, the reader is left as the only real arbiter of truth: everyone is the same deep down, and everyone believes they are the only one failing. It’s not an uplifting read, but it is an enlightening one. With this keen insight at his disposal, Jeong Mu has a promising literary career ahead of him.
At once foreign and familiar, Jeong Mu’s A MIRROR FOR THE BLIND provides keen insight into both the traditional and technological forces weighing on young adults in modern South Korea.
~Kara Dennison for IndieReader