BookBrowse Reviews Almond by Sohn Won-pyung

BookBrowse:

When tragedy strikes, a neurodivergent teenage boy is left on his own to navigate daily life and a budding connection with the delinquent new kid at school.

Almond is Sohn Won-pyung's debut novel (translated from Korean by Sandy Joosun Lee) about Yunjae, a 15-year-old who is alexithymic, or unable to recognize or express emotions. Yunjae explains that the amygdalae are two small, almond-shaped structures in the human brain which allow us to experience emotions, but his almonds are dysfunctional. He says, "[F]or some reason, my almonds don't seem to work well. They don't really light up when they are stimulated. So I don't know why people laugh or cry. Joy, sorrow, love, fear - all these things are vague ideas to me. The words 'emotion' and 'empathy' are just meaningless letters in print." His Mom wants him to have an ordinary life, so she and Yunjae's Granny teach him how to perform emotional reactions in order to approximate "normality."

Yunjae is comfortable living with Mom and Granny, helping to run their used bookstore, until one snowy Christmas Eve when his world comes crashing down. After a meal out at a restaurant, Mom and Granny are brutally attacked by a knife-wielding stranger, an incident that leaves Granny dead and Mom in the hospital in a coma. Yunjae confesses, "I simply watched the whole thing unfold before me. Just standing there with blank eyes, as always."

After the attack, Yunjae visits the hospital where Mom is being treated. Through a strange series of events, which begin at the hospital, he meets Gon, a boy his age who has had a difficult past. Gon is the opposite of Yunjae — he is loud, a troublemaker and always looking for a fight, though his bravado comes from a place of emotional pain. At one point, he tells Yunjae, "[I]f I can't protect myself from being hurt, I'd rather hurt other people."

With its confessional tone and short chapters, the novel is diary-like, showing a record of Yunjae's daily life after the attack and his attempts to understand more about his neurodivergent brain. Both Yunjae and Gon have distinctive, well-written voices. Yunjae is very precise with his use of language. There is an insightful directness to his words in contrast with Gon's messy and invective-littered speech. It was fun to realize that Yunjae's expressiveness changes subtly over the course of the novel as he spends more time with Gon.

Gon's initial bullying and violence toward Yunjae may make some readers uncomfortable, especially as Yunjae keeps coming back to Gon despite this ill treatment. However, the novel often strikes an openly moral tone, specifically to the tune of "don't judge people too quickly," which is most noticeable in the fraught relationship between the two boys. Throughout the novel, people call Yunjae a "weirdo" because he never expresses emotion and they say Gon is "scary" because he is too expressive and in the wrong ways. But Yunjae doesn't jump to conclusions about Gon, even after Gon starts his "new hobby" of bullying Yunjae relentlessly.

Yunjae wonders if Gon is similar to the man who stabbed Mom and Granny. He also wonders, because he didn't react during the gruesome crime, if he himself is like the attacker. These questions trouble him, so he allows Gon to get closer, explaining, "I wanted to understand the world a little better. To do that, I needed Gon." Despite Gon's violence, the boys develop a bond. In explaining why he is friends with Gon, Yunjae says, "I knew that Gon was a good kid. But if someone asked me to describe him in more detail, I'd only be able to say that he beat me and hurt me, he ripped apart a butterfly, he set his face against the teachers, and threw things at my classmates. That's how language is... So, I simply said, 'I just know he is.'"

The use of language is a subtler theme woven into the story. After watching a K-pop (Korean pop music) group accept an award on TV and flippantly say that they love all their fans, Yunjae thinks, "[C]an the word 'love' be thrown around so casually like that? ...From what I understood, love is an extreme idea. It seemed to force something undefinable into the prison of a word. Such an overused word. People used the word 'love' so casually, if they were feeling slightly good or thankful." It seems that it is precisely because Yunjae can't recognize emotions and has had to study them that he has such a profound understanding of the rather subjective nature of the language humans use to describe feelings. This slipperiness of language, of how people describe their worlds and the ways they experience them, is really at the heart of Almond, and is brought to light by this unexpected protagonist.

My biggest critique of the novel didn't fully reveal itself until near the end of it, when Yunjae's elderly neighbor (and de facto guardian and mentor after he loses his family) utters the words, "[T]o be honest, I have always doubted your diagnosis," after Yunjae rather miraculously gains some ability to experience emotion in a more conventional way. The implication is that Yunjae, with this new ability, somehow becomes "more" — more acceptable, more normal, more valued — than he was before. This seems entirely superfluous, like a trick to make readers feel good after Yunjae has experienced so much tragedy. It undermines the message given throughout the rest of book that Yunjae, even though he is unable to identify emotions, is already a fully developed human being, capable of making decisions and forming complex opinions about himself and his world. By sowing doubt about his disability diagnosis, Sohn robs a neurodivergent person of his intrinsic value, something that happens all too frequently in both fiction and real life.

This last critique is a big one to be sure, but I would still recommend the book because of its overall positive representation of a young neurodivergent character. Almond is a complex coming-of-age story featuring an alexithymic protagonist who finds himself in the unlikeliest of friendships, exploring the nature of love, fear, hate and the language people use, and misuse, to describe their messy emotions.

This review was originally published in The BookBrowse Review in July 2020, and has been updated for the June 2021 edition. Click here to go to this issue.