Book Review: Lemon

Who Dares Destroy this Lovely Form?

That the murder victim, Hae-on, is beautiful is central to whatever it is that the gifted and baffling Korean writer Kwon Yeo-sun has created with Lemon, a novel in eight vignettes totaling fewer than 150 pages. As Hae-on’s sister says, “She was perfection, bliss personified. But more than anything, she was at that mythical age: 18. Who dared destroy her lovely form?”

Hae-on’s body — not defiled; just dead, with very little gore inflicted on the reader — is discovered in a tucked-away park in Seoul during the soccer-loving summer of 2002. Though the link between soccer and Hae-on’s death remains unclear, FIFA roars in the background of the chapters dedicated to her disappearance, the discovery of her body, and the interrogation of the primary suspect — grilled in classic murder-mystery fashion by a detective so hard-boiled he might as well be one of the eggs consumed throughout by the victim’s younger sister, Dae-on.

Dae-on is one of Lemon’s three narrators, all first-person, who step without warning to the helm of the tale. New chapter and, boom! We are in a different narrator’s head. Adding to the confusion, the story jumps back and forth in time. Nothing is easy about Lemon — including {SPOILER ALERT} that the murder is never clearly resolved. According to Nigerian-British novelist Oyinkan…