'About my daughter': caring and distrusting

The narrator of this limpid novel, written by the young Korean writer Kim Hye-jin, speaks from a state of mind that is a state of consciousness: “…I don't have anyone to come rescue me from exhaustion.

I worry about what will happen when the time comes when I can't fend for myself."

From that place, so recognizable in neoliberal societies, the worker at a residence for the elderly who takes in her daughter, a university professor, who cannot pay rent and whose partner is another woman, speaks.

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The narrator narrates living together from a contradiction: her refusal to care for or be cared for by people whose way of loving she does not understand —she cannot even imagine— opposes her concern for the fate of Jen, an old woman famous for her activism, who now lies Abandoned at the residence.

Only the narrator remembers the value of an existence dedicated to others.

The evolution of the gaze of this narrator, the result of her time, her culture and her disenchantment, takes place between the isolating individualism of those who believe that collective struggles are useless and the certainty regarding the precariousness of public services and the violation of human rights.

The problems to live in decent housing;

the destructive economies of nursing homes that hide the use of diapers;

the forgetfulness of disinterested kindness;

the difficulty in establishing family ties between the collision of the old and the new: everything is told without drama, with the inevitability of the everyday, with the words of a narrator, immersed in the society of fatigue, who is looking for minuscule heroic formulas.

Save Jen.

The bodily metaphor of

, by Han Kang, another overwhelming Korean novelist, thins out in

until it reaches a hygienic prose that refers to the work of the caregiver.

Kim Hye-Jin, with her scalpel observation, is ahead of her age and literary reinterprets the feelings of a woman, vulnerable and strong, who is afraid of the future: she thinks that she will not find refuge in the warmth of intimacy: “This girl , born of me, blood of my blood, is perhaps the person I feel most distant.

Nor will it find a non-vexatious protection in the care that countries owe to their citizens.

The story expresses the impotence of a lucid woman who distrusts everything that is not her personal goodwill.

He distrusts political action: the involvement of her daughter with the homosexual faculty at the university seems useless and dangerous to him;

however, she admires Jen's past.

With searing simplicity,

focuses on the generational clash and the crisis of a society whose traditional values ​​—respect for the elderly, the value of a job well done, slowness— are incompatible with capitalist practices.

The mother-child story symbolizes the change in values ​​in Korea: the complex struggle between tradition and turbocapitalism generates uncertainties that are giving rise to great cinema and great literature.

The narrator experiences the end of one time and the beginning of another wild and inhuman one, marked by thrift and lack of respect for memory.

However, little by little, with delicacy and truth, she draws a slight tolerance: the tension of the relationships is relaxed thanks to the partner of her daughter.

The same truth is used to describe the misery of a corrupt world where, out of greed, our elders suffer from deep ulcers because their pee gets soaked through half a diaper and newspaper.

Here we still have that sore open.

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