![]() 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. 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. Women in Seoul can choose to have their faces sculpted to look like someone else’s. It is a city where beauty rules and young women regularly undergo surgery to look like their idols. The novel is set in modern-day Seoul – a hyperreal dystopia of plastic surgery, call girls and a strict social hierarchy. 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. ![]() No single object can handle this amount of raw buzz. ![]() Who thought it was a good idea to have über-zeitgeisty names like Taylor Jenkins Reid, Helen Oyeyemi and Jia Tolentino plastered on the cover of a book like this? It’s reckless. I just can’t sleep with the frantic buzz coming off it. I’ve taken to keeping my copy of Frances Cha’s If I Had Your Face in my sock drawer. ![]()
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