A lengthy, ambitious and mostly engaging panorama of a family's trials spread over a roughly hundred-year period in Korea and Japan. Many reviewers likened the author's style to Dickens or Tolstoy, but for me the comparison with Garcia Marquez is perhaps more valid, once you strip out the magic realism, which is absent in Pachinko. At the heart of the work is a consideration about the sacrifices any family may make, how the endurance of hardship can fortify. Min Jin Lee is not afraid of being bold, and the (somewhat) surprising way in which certain characters are killed off is enough to engage the reader. Pachinko (recommended by Jim McCafferty) is also highly interesting from a historical perspective, illuminating to me, since I was not fully aware prior to reading this, just how much Koreans in Japan were (and remain) subject to racial abuse and bigotry. As a theme — also explored well elsewhere — the dynamic of being a foreigner, both at ‘home’ (a Korean born in Japan) and ‘away’ (not a true Korean, if returning to Korea), is perennially fascinating.
By Min Jin Lee