Pachinko (2017)

Notes

2026-06-25

It does a good job of switching between different view points and racing through time but many of the characters stubbornly refuse to come to life. The constraints of mass market contemporary fiction mean there are cerrtain limits I guess, but I would have stood for a few hundered more pages if it meant we got a richer picture of more of the characters. The shady Koh Hansu looms over the whole novel but he never gets an equivalent to that stretch in Middlemarch where Elliot takes time to see the world from the perspective of Nicholas Bulstrode.