A few years ago, a friend left her city apartment for a new job in a sprawling suburb, where her home search was dispiriting: There were no apartments, she reported, and every house had a large suite and two small bedrooms, encouraging a family. I thought of her while reading Gu Byeong-Mo’s novel “Apartment Women,” skillfully translated by Chi-Young Kim, about an experimental community in what one character disparagingly calls “the middle of nowhere,” in South Korea.
The Dream Future Pilot Communal Apartments are a government-funded complex for couples who, after passing a competitive application process, pledge to “do your best to have at least three children.” Four couples arrive, ready to procreate, or so it seems. Gu deftly follows the women as each couple stops being polite and starts getting real. Danhui, a meticulous, judgmental organizer, appoints herself and her husband the commune leaders. Yojin works in a pharmacy while her husband stays home — a situation that baffles the others. Gyowon learns how close the quarters can be in an abusive relationship, and Hyonae, a painter, plans to continue making her art from home. Each brings secret reasons for needing the subsidized housing, revealed throughout the novel.
If it takes a village to raise a child, “Apartment Women” exposes the village’s disadvantages. In response to her sense of isolation, Danhui manipulates the others into running a communal day care: “Even if it takes a little more effort, we have to share the burden together.” But Hyonae’s new role as a caretaker interferes with her art, and sense of self. And outside the apartments, in the book’s most resonant passages, Yojin is forced to navigate the advances of Danhui’s husband as they car-pool to their respective jobs. A joke, a touch, and Yojin is caught in an agonizing and relatable trap: risk compliance by remaining silent, or risk offense by overreacting to an innocent gesture. As she considers returning an expensive and unsolicited gift, Yojin “wondered if she was abnormal for considering this excessive in the first place, and if making an issue out of it was an inconsiderate response to another person’s kindness.” It’s a delectable time bomb with a satisfying fuse.
The novel expertly renders women’s inner suffering. “Whatever happened,” Yojin thinks, “she didn’t want to be in the ludicrous position of having to demand, What exactly did you mean by that?” Hyonae “couldn’t sketch or paint anything as she watched her skills and desires, inseparable as they were from the daily grind, yellow and harden like forgotten two-day-old rice.” The women gradually begin to fear their Dream Apartments are more like hostile architecture, an urban design strategy that aggressively restricts comfort. (Think: spikes on windowsills, city benches bisected by iron handles.)
A novel is also a dwelling, and this one echoes its subject thematically. If interiority is a potentially endless veranda, Gu’s protagonists are surprisingly limited by theirs; not even their dreams venture from heteronormative familial ideals. Some readers might long for a literal or metaphorical trap door that would pierce or reveal; others might appreciate the apt claustrophobia of the author’s restraint.
Gu is an exciting writer in the contemporary renaissance in Korean art. Like the 2024 Nobel laureate Han Kang, Gu gives voice to the rich inner lives of women grappling with misogyny. (Her previous novel, “The Old Woman With the Knife,” also translated by Kim, is about a 65-year-old female assassin.)
After fuses explode in satisfying if unsurprising ways, there is a lovely scene in which a new tenant considers a cumbersome backyard table in the complex’s shared yard: “This was a space ruled by a strict sense of what should be, rather than utility or reason.” A valuable look into the culture of communal living that has earned South Korea the nickname “the republic of apartments,” this novel wisely invites readers into these spaces, to move through the design and derive its purpose for themselves.
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