One hundred shadows - H. Jungeun

I guess these notes contain spoilers.

So nothing really happens for the whole books. Completely descriptive. This shadow thing is cleary a metaphor, I struggle to understand for what exactly, except the obvious, vague one. I did not understand the part with the matriosca, even after spending some time on it.
To be completely fair I thought sometimes descriptions were a bit cheap. More often than it should (it shouldn’t imo) happen, things are described as “nor… nor…” or referred to as undescribable or similar. I remember Dante doing it a lot nel Paradiso, but a. He kind of had a point, b. He was coming from two books keeping things in rhyme and I can kind of sympathize¹. This I found a bit disappointing.
One thing I definitively did like: the translation. Something of the Korean language is really still there, the dialogues reflect the language authentically. I liked this. Also, look at this metaphor:

[…] like putting rice puffs in the mouth of an eager baby sparrow.

You would never write this spontaneously in English, right? What is even a rice puff, and why a baby sparrow of all creatures. It’s the kind of awkwardness you get when translating directly from a language - there was a very nice post on HONY with this woman saying his husband was an “island in her life”, apparenty a direct translation of a proverbio in her mother tongue. You hear it like that and it makes you stop and think, you hear the usual one and you don’t. So you still get (a small part of) the added value of the foreign language without having to be able to read it. Good translation, I liked it.