I Have the Right to Destroy Myself

by Young-Ha Kim and Kim Young-ha

Book Overview

In the fast-paced, high-urban landscape of Seoul, C and K are brothers who have fallen in love with the same woman--Se-yeon--who tears at both of them as they all try desperately to find real connection in an atomized world. A spectral, nameless narrator haunts the edges of their lives as he tells of his work helping the lost and hurting find escape through suicide. Dreamlike and beautiful, the South Korea brought forth in this novel is cinematic...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0156030802
• ISBN13: 9780156030809
• Release Date: July 2007
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
• Length: 132 Pages
• Weight: 0.33 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 6.6" x 7.9"

Customer Reviews

Seems like yesterday

Seems like yesterday when I first found I Have The Right To Destroy Myself in a used bookstore. It was completely by chance too. I saw it out of the corner of my eye and I ended up buying it. This book is one of the best books I've ever read. I was realistically dark and twisted. And that's not something just any writer can pull off. Young-Ha Kim is amazing. After I read it I soon got on this site to see if he had anymore books out. That's when I found this one. I read it in about an hour and a half and it was great. There is actually two stories in this book. Photo Shop Murder and What Ever Happened to the Guy Stuck in the Elevator? The first story was good but I like the 2nd one way better! If you think you ever had a bad day, then read What Ever Happened to the Guy Stuck in the Elevator? It'll make you think twice. Trust me. ~Jesse I Have the Right to Destroy Myself (Harvest Original)

A short review without giving anything away

I Have the Right to Destroy Myself (Harvest Original) Overall, I thought the book was brilliant. It is one of the best works I have ever encountered. Kim's style reminded me of several other writers: Hemmingway, Shirley Jackson, and Jonathan Safran Foer. The relation to Hemmingway is obvious to anyone whose read the book. The succint, but poignant, sentences make the work easy to read, but no less powerful. The connection to Shirley Jackson occurred to me because of his focus on the aesthetic of mortality and morbidity. I reminded myself, just now, of a scene in the novel where C, one of the unnamed characters, is arguing with one of the three female characters over the desire or fear of immortality. Mankind, according to the narrator, fears the pure, unbounded nature of a white canvass. Getting back to the point; I was reminded of Foer because of two reasons: the use of aesthetic distance to observe the perverseness of human nature and the modern voice. Foer used a poor English translator as narrator for much of his work; Kim uses a narrator who is telling the story of his writing a story. Both men are modern authors, relatively close in age and both became successful at a very early age for writers (26F and 28K). The only "named" characters in the work are three women. Unfortunately, I don't have my copy of the book with me and can only remember one name Se-yeon--which is just as well, since her story comprises 2/3 of the novel. Her love of Chupa Chups and fascination with the abstarct make her an intriguing and dangerous character. As anyone can read in the publisher's synopsis, Se-yeon, has two brothers (C. and K.) in love with her. In the end, however, everyone in the North Pole lives forever. The other two female characters will be named by what I comes to mind when I think of them: Vienna and Art. Vienna is unique in that she takes place only in the story of the unnamed narrator. Art, well, is an artist. All three women, and I found this to be delightful, are likened to Gustav Klimt's Judith (see picture at bottom of post). Each woman, seemingly, exemplifies (more than the other two) a single aspect of the portrait. Vienna, for example, is most easily likened to Judith's exposed left breast. C. and K. are two "unnamed" brothers. C. is a video artist and K. is a bullet-taxi driveer (Bang.) There is a lot of tension between the brothers. The novel is a little jumpy at first. I say "at first" because it only takes a second to get used to the style. After a while, you don't notice the jumps at all. The story flows exceedingly well, especially for a translation. The jump remind me of...picking up a stack of polaroids that tell a few stories. You don't necessarily pick them all up in the correct order, but that only enhances the sensations. You might, for instance, pick up a picture of you at age three, and then pick up a picture of your burned house from age 8, and a picture of your grandmother's urn from age six. The story may not alwa

Embracing One's Destiny

Young-Ha Kim's slim novel I Have the Right to Destroy Myself opens with the nameless narrator's description of a painting, Jacques-Louis David's The Death of Marat. Murdered by the woman whose letter he was responding to, it is David's depiction of Marat's face that the narrator is attracted to because it expresses the perfect balance hatred and understanding of what fate befell him. It is this serenity expressed in Marat's dead visage that the narrator tries to bring to his own work. A well-educated man who enjoys travel and art, the narrator has quite a bizarre profession: He suggests to his clients to take a form of action that society would normally object to. To a seventeen-year-old girl who is raped nightly by her father he suggests through his hotline that she take his life. However, the cases that truly interest him are those who have truly given up hope but who are grasping at the last threads of hope. The nameless narrator in his own kind, gentle way tells his clients that they should forget these threads of hope and give themselves over to death and he, with his trusty laptop, has a number of methods to aid them in their search for peace. Besides our nameless narrator, I Have the Right to Destroy Myself also revolves a love triangle consisting of the brothers C and K and their lady friend Se-yeon. K, a taxi driver, was the first to meet Se-yeon when she worked as a bargirl and C, a mixed media artist, met the girl on the day of his mother's funeral when he discovered K and Se-yeon making love on his couch. C quickly falls for Se-yeon because of the time and care that she gives sucking on lollipops and the two begin to see each other. However, this relationship is far from stable and one night during a massive snowstorm, things truly begin to break apart. The trio of C, K, and Se-yeon, also called Judith because of her resemblance to the Judith within Gustav Klimt's painting of the same name, are later joined by a couple of other characters, a woman from Hong Kong who gets dreadfully sick when she drinks water and Yu Mimi, another artist who uses her mane of hair as her brush, making for a quite interesting cast whose main connection is the death obsessed narrator. Because of the novel's brevity the characters are not completely fleshed out, but they are interesting enough and Kim's skill as an author allows the reader to know enough about each character in a few sentences to keep the reader from being too much in the dark. Another interesting aspect of the novel is it references to art and film. As I have already mentioned in this review, Jacques-Louis David's The Death of Marat and Gustav Klimt's Judith play important roles in this novel and Eugène Delacroix's The Death of Sardanapalus which moves the nameless narrator because of the stoic way in which Sardanapalus accepts his fate by first having all that is dear to him destroyed. Although the references to these paintings might make the book seem a bit highbrow it its art refere

I really liked this book.

When I think about it "objectively" this book really wasn't THAT great. Normally I would rate it 4 or even 3 stars, but I just really enjoyed this book. When I first looked at it I thought "Oh, another book with death and sex. How 'deep.'" but something compelled me to read it, and it was great! The writing was simple, which I love because it frees one's mind to analyze the text. Clearly, there was a lot of thought and planning put into the structure of the book. Kim has a wonderful way of interleaving the stories that take place at different times which creates, as another reviewer stated, a "dream-like" effect. The transitions in time and to various parts of the story are seemless. This would be a wonderful book to analyze in full, and I certainly hope I have the time to do so! This is certainly an entertaining (though dark) book on any level -- for a light or indepth read.

beware of strangers in art galleries

This was a neat little find...also one of the more viscerally disturbing books I've read in a while. Dark, clear, spare writing and a very smooth translation. It scared the heck out of me the first time I read it, and so I started over and read it again. Check it out.