It is a truly ambivalent work, a sort of literary version of the baby inside Brecht’s chalk circle being tugged and pulled by two opposing forces. Is it a critique or a celebration of these women?.The novel’s unwillingness to pick a side greatly affects its overall intensions. It is difficult to judge the tone of Cha’s novel. It is incredibly difficult to lattice narratives like this, and Cha must be commended for taking on such a meticulous form of storytelling, even though the final narrative resembles less the egg-washed top of a cherry pie than the tangled mass of tails that forms a rat king.
Instead, Cha decides to interweave her four narratives somewhat haphazardly into something that only resembles a plot. It would take a critic far more skilled than myself to glean something resembling a plot from If I Had Your Face. However, all the novel seems to have is its characters. one of the most 'current' characters that I’ve come across in fiction this year. Kyuri is captivating and ludicrous, much like the novel itself. Depending on how you read this novel it could either be a horrifying insight into contemporary Korean society or, and this was how I read it, a gloriously camp celebration of the excesses of a deranged society – Jackie Collins meets Margaret Atwood. When you begin reading If I Had Your Face it isn’t difficult to see why it comes garlanded with praise on high from the literati.
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