Anyone who has followed this blog for a minute knows I am a huge fan of Isabel J Kim's short stories and was hotly anticipating this book. To the point I got scared I wasn't going to like it. Fear not! It's as exciting and strange as her short fiction, with more room to let the characters breathe.
Sublimation is set in a world exactly like ours—except when you step over a border with the intent to emigrate, you are split in two, leaving behind a separate self: an instance. The novel follows two pairs of young Koreans with American instances: Rose, traveling back to South Korea for her grandfather's funeral and speaking to her Korean instance Soyoung for the first time ever, and her childhood friend Yujin and his American instance YJ, who talk to each other like right & left hemispheres of the brain.
The first half of the book is deeply introspective, tracing the space between Soyoung and Rose and the legibility of each woman's desires—to her instance, but also to herself. What makes you you? What part is genetics, upbringing, the people you've surrounded yourself with? Why do you want what you want? Told in second person, it's a funhouse mirror of self-recognition and alienation.* The narrative is interlaced with reimaginings of Korean folk tales, the Odyssey, and the Garden of Eden as they play out in a world of instancing.
The second half pivots to a technothriller plot as Soyoung/Rose and Yujin/YJ's lives collide with the greater political and technological forces trying to control instancing. This part of the book is rapidly paced, complete with a naked knife fight and a big cinematic finish, but it also has some fascinating experimental writing and insights into the characters.
I've texted a dozen people I know about this book—my uncle who loves Dark Matter, my coworker who loves diaspora lit—because it's such an interesting & fresh blend of genres. For anyone interested in doppelgangers, body snatching, women with nothing to lose, the inability to return home, and strange prose.
*There's apparently a percentage of Storygraph users who DNF here, saying it's "slow" and the POV is "confusing." My Harrow the Ninth-loving followers will have no troubles.
