Name: Apartment Women
Rating: 4 (9 reviews)
Author: Gu Byeong-mo

About this book

Summary

Book Summary

From the New York Times notable author of The Old Woman with the Knife comes a bracingly original story of family, marriage and the cultural expectations of motherhood, about four women whose lives intersect in dramatic and unexpected ways at a government-run apartment complex outside Seoul.

When Yojin moves with her husband and daughter into the Dream Future Pilot Communal Apartments, she's ready for a fresh start. Located on the outskirts of Seoul, the experimental community is a government initiative designed to boost the national birth rate. Like her neighbors, Yojin has agreed to have at least two more children over the next ten years.

Yet, from the day she arrives, Yojin feels uneasy about the community spirit thrust upon her. Her concerns grow as communal child care begins and the other parents show their true colors. Apartment Women traces the lives of four women in the apartments, all with different aspirations and beliefs. Will they find a way to live peacefully? Or are the cultural expectations around parenthood stacked against them from the start?

A trenchant social novel from an award-winning author, Apartment Women incisively illuminates the unspoken imbalance of women's parenting labor, challenging the age-old assumption that "it takes a village" to raise a child.

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Media Reviews

"Piercing... Keenly portrays the toll taken by gendered expectations. This is a perceptive novel of motherhood's double binds." —Publishers Weekly

"Via breezy, engaging storytelling, Gu's realist novel explores the roles of women, with protagonists who discuss parenting and work-life balance while contending with meeting social, cultural, and societal mores. Readers will eagerly follow this story through to see which couples, if any, succeed in meeting the concept behind this distinctive living situation. A good pick for book clubs." —Library Journal

"Meticulously translated by prize-winning Kim, Gu's bitingly perceptive observations about womanhood, wifehood, and motherhood adroitly provoke acute feelings of breathtaking claustrophobia amidst stifling societal expectations." —Booklist

"Reading this incisive, delicate and wholly original book, I found that words like 'family', 'neighbor', 'nature', and 'community' no longer evoked warm and bountiful images in me. They gave me a chill. And I know that this is reality." —Cho Nam-joo, author of Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982

"Gu Byeong-mo's Apartment Women is a sharp examination of the boundary between the utopic ideals of community and the dystopian realities of late capitalism. The characters—beautifully drawn, full of flaws and wholly human—live side-by-side in a tense intimacy that haunted me long after I put the book down." —Sarah Ruiz-Grossman, author of A Fire So Wild

This information about Apartment Women was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.

Reader Reviews

Write your own review

skyy

quite good
I quite enjoy Asian literature, and don’t too often take issue with translations; however, either Gu Byeong-mo’s Apartment Women is suffering from a translation disconnect or this book is lacking in some necessary style. The premise sounds pretty incredible, if I am being honest - several families move into an apartment complex in the middle of nowhere as part of a government experiment on communal living. This is my cup of tea because I love social studies.
A couple with a young child moves into a government funded apartment and meets three other couple with children. If each couple have three children within 10-year period, the newly constructed, cheap apartment in nice, quite rural area becomes their own. The four family starts a community based child care for their children, and started to get to know each other-perhaps a bit too much.

There were so many phrases, sentences that describes how women go through while/after becoming mom. The terror that you feel when someone completely become dependent on you was described so vividly. The difficult partnership between male and female, especially with males grown up in Korean standard of gender role feels to touch the reality so well. There was one chapter going through how women (moms) end up with so much more mental/emotional burden of everyday life at work and with family- I think only woman who had struggled with the family duties and her own work would be able to illustrate so well.

I felt one of the main character, YoJin's inner narrative resonate with me so much. Yojin, she continuously doubts herself whether her reaction to social relationship is appropriate. She does not try to listen how she feels, but keep churning whether her reaction is appropriate to avoid conflicts and for being not perceived as a difficult women. I wonder how many of us who grow up with long list of to-dos and must-not-dos as being a girl would go through such inner justification and doubts endlessly, instead of trying to listen to what you're truly feeling or thinking.

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