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Six novels feature characters who hunger for connection so strongly that they transform their environments.
Credit.Ryan Gillett
May 27, 2021, 9:55 a.m. ET
Assembling columns is often an exercise in serendipity. For this one, I looked for works I thought would be wildly different from one another: a collection of short stories in translation, a debut about a single consciousness in multiple bodies, a young-adult techno-thriller, an Antarctic ghost story. But I was surprised to find, as I read my way through them, that they explored similar themes: adoption and child-rearing, intergenerational traumas, and characters who hunger for connection, communion and belonging so powerfully that they transform their environments, on scales ranging from the municipal to the cosmic.
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In the title story of
I’m Waiting For You, the first of Korean science fiction writer Kim Bo-Young’s works to be translated into English, the unnamed protagonist says he felt he was prepared for solo space travel because he’d once spent a few months without leaving his home. After a year in which so much of the world has experienced an even more extreme version of such isolation, that idea might seem trite. But then the character goes on to explain how wrong he was:
That wasn’t actually living alone. I have never once really lived alone. Someone cleared away the trash I left out for collection, and emptied the septic tank… In another place they boiled noodles and put them in a dish and delivered them… I had never lived alone, not once. How would really living alone even be possible?