I must admit at first to having a niggling suspicion that the immense popularity in Russia of the crime writing genre was the impetus behind this engrossing translation of Kwon Yeo-sun’s Lemon, that this was an attempt to reproduce the success of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo formula. Nothing could be further from the truth. One may as well call Scheherazade’s 1001 Nights a snuff film or slap a “murder mystery” label on Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, Kafka’s The Trial, Camus’ The Stranger, Kharms’s Old Woman, Hitchcock’s Psycho, or Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express.

The plot of this gnomic tale (we are given the premise and scope in advance) is so dangerously thin it is easy to wince should the author whiff, but the entire gamut of the grand themes, the intricate network of the enduring values of Existentialism, is present in spades here, so that the sincerest compliment I can pay this slim novella (that can be read in one sitting, something I would not recommend) is: Lemon truly bears re-reading. It is “literary,” and a specimen of realistic fiction (of New Sincerity) in its concerns for intimate psychological states only. 

From the get-go, our first narrator, for our text is polyphonic, frames her story within genre conventions: “I draw a scene in my mind that took place a long time ago in the interrogation room of a certain police precinct. This does not mean that I imagined the whole thing . . .” This places us immediately within the realm of memory and re-creation, of the oral tradition whose roots hark back, in the western tradition, to Greek tragedy. Our book in fact begins in the manner of a play, with a preface page of dramatis personae.

But this voice, like all the female voices here—three main and an additional one within the eight brief sections, each representing a different social stratum—is disembodied. That these voices are not sufficiently differentiated—the work’s greatest weakness—is also, by design I think, part of its strength (all the women’s voices are part of one woman.) That we as readers find it initially disorienting to determine who is speaking forces us to locate ourselves and, in an act of empathy, collaborate with the various narrators in reconstructing, along with the events, the meaning of meaning.

Not merely unreliable but at times uncertain narrators, all sorts of doubling and re-doubling and fragmentation, as in a hall of mirrors, the essential loneliness and emptiness of life, the absence of meaning and connection, the utter impossibility of communication, but also the significance of coincidence and synchronicity, the bonds of family and class, and, finally, the solace of religion and faith (in something, in anything,) always and eternal—the meaning of suffering, redemption, and guilt.

Due to space limitations, I can cite only a single example of the intensity of feeling this writing capably evokes—simultaneously, the utter absurdity and the intense pathos of a mother’s doomed attempts to posthumously change her daughter’s legal name to what she had intended it to be as a way perhaps of establishing the necessary illusion of regaining control over the narrative by providing her daughter with an alternate existence. (The word being sacred, just as it is one’s character, so destiny is in one’s name.) 

Though the identity of the authors of the crime is squarely hinted at, given the impossibility of establishing the truth with any degree of certainty, it does not ultimately matter. In their attempts to reconstruct and make sense of the crime each narrator kills the beautiful girl over and over again, so that there is enough guilt to go around. Given her objectification, the girl’s beauty had been a curse that made her, along with everyone else’s existence or non-existence, immaterial. While the author’s impulses appear to be genuinely Christian, the book’s title offers us the best clue of her true intentions. Lemon refers to a poem the central narrator, the author’s stand in so to speak, had written in high school about a peripheral personage in James’s Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, a hapless Eleanor Rigby of sorts. Like a lingering aftertaste, this self-referential nod reminds us we have just read a constructed narrative, art and not a literal account (these readings are not incompatible by the way). The subject of the poem, that character’s lack of agency, echoes the narrator’s own progressive loss of self (she had long stopped writing).

One of a score of themes I found most engaging may serve as a warning of sorts: the greatest danger that confronts each of us in our media-saturated but virtually isolated age is depersonalization. In this sense, I found this novel to be ideal reading for a plague year for the habits of self-awareness, attention, and presence it cultivates. But each reader will find in it a different kernel of truth for themselves. Lemon is a work that I hope readers will return to again and again. I know this reader will.

Alex Cigale

Poet, Essayist, and Translator

Author, Russian Absurd; the Selected Writings of Daniil Kharms (2017)