(courtesy Bloomsbury Publishing)
Bookshops are, for book buyers at least, innately warm and comforting places.
Quite apart from the fact that they offer a wealth of possible storytelling possibilities, they also feel like a step away from the hustle and bustle of day-to-day life which to greater or lesser extents we all need.
But what about the people running the stores, particularly independent bookshops which, romantic notions of book selling aside, have no choice but to heed the harsh realities of the capitalist system in which they exist? How does it feel to be on the side of the counter?
It’s a question that Hwang Bo-reum answers with real humanity and empathetic understanding in Welcome to the Hyunam-dong Bookshop, where she explores a common theme in bookshop literature of the found family that forms around a shared love of books and a need for real connection, but in an expanded way, letting us seeing behind the bookshop curtain so to speak, into the way in which the bookseller themselves is affected by events in their enterprise.
For Yeongju, there’s never been any question, post a corporate life she didn’t enjoy and a marriage that left her emotionally spent, that she must start a bookshop.
While smart enough to know how taxing this might be business-wise, she is ultimately driven by a need to please herself for once, especially in a society – the novel is set in a neighbourhood in Seoul, South Korea – and to let her passions finally find tangible form.
His simple life – yoga, work, movies, sleep – was starting to feel like a well-put-together routine. Perhaps life was enough as it was.
It’s not an easy thing to do in a society heavy with highly demanding expectations from career aspirations to marriage and family where one step away from the norm is met with curiosity but more likely antagonism and scorn, but Yeongju dives in any way, driven by a need to feel some sort of personal accomplishment after some intense personal trauma.
At first the dream of owning a bookshop is overshadowed by her personal pain, and Welcome to the Hyunam-dong Bookshop acknowledges fairly readily that Yeongju spends much of her first six months or so running the store letting her sadness leak out everywhere and putting off any customers that might wander past.
But slowly Yeongju comes alive again, and hired Minjun, a young twenty-something stuck under the weight of his career bind, as her barista, a job he takes on because he has little else on offer but which proves to be transformational form in all kinds of ways.
He, like just every character in Welcome to the Hyunam-dong Bookshop, is struggling with the idea of following their hearts when everyone around them, bar their slowly-coalescing bookshop family, says that they must get a good job, marry the right person and sacrifice personal fulfilment on the alter of a greater good which is not doing anyone any favours but which must be adhered to, unquestioningly, come what may.
(courtesy Bloomsbury Publishing)
Focused tightly on the idea that you can do everything you are supposed to and still have things not work out as promised, Welcome to the Hyunam-dong Bookshop is a glowing but realistic love letter to the idea that life is short and that though it is hard to deny the almighty tide of orthodox belief that you owe it to yourself to give it shot.
Having said that, while this is most clearly the main theme running through this warmhearted and groundedly lovely novel, it is not delivered without full cognisance about how difficult it is to put expectations aside and to move in life in a way that’s right for you.
The author knows all too well, as someone who was a software engineer before becoming a writer, that following your dreams, while good for the soul, comes with all kinds of nasty, barbed consequences with each of the characters from Minjun through to coffee bean roaster Jimi (also Yeongju’s best friend) and knitting corporate refugee Jungsuh and a raft of other compelling people all too aware that while following their heart is increasingly a non-negotiable for them that it’s not going to be an easy path to follow.
Even with that in mind though, Welcome to the Hyunam-dong Bookshop dares to challenge everyone who reads it, and let’s be honest, we all have some strictures and expectations upon us that we struggle to shrug off, to look hard at their lives and ask themselves whether, the great challenge of swimming against the flow aside, they wouldn’t be happy heading off to pastures new, censure be damned.
She’d expended too much energy bottling things up; they lodged deep inside her. From now on, she could let go. Even if the tears returned, it was something she had to see through. To learn to let go. When the time came for her to be able to recollect the past without tears, she would finally be able to put her hand up and happily hold on to the present. And to cherish it dearly.
Of course, doing that would be well nigh impossible by yourself and the real joy of Welcome to the Hyunam-dong Bookshop is that while everyone starts on this journey alone, pretty much in every instance, without much say in the matter, they are encouraged further along the path by the people they come to know at Yeongju little bookshop tucked away in a quiet corner of a yet-to-gentrify neighbourhood.
Yeongju’s dream, which comes loaded with a fear of failure and some huge financial risk, eventually becomes a haven for all kinds of disparate people, each of them finding a place of safety and sanctuary in the bookshop which they then help sustain and grow by their involvement in everything from serving customers to attending the many community events that Yeongju runs to keep the place alive but more importantly, to celebrate a love of books and writing.
Reading how all these wonderful characters finds a home and renewed purpose against some fairly intimately opposition and considerable odds is a rare and wondrous joy, but just as rewarding is finding yourself buoyed and encouraged to follow your dreams and to defy expectation shackled onto you by others.
Welcome to the Hyunam-dong Bookshop knows it’s asking its characters, and by extension you, to be brave and to swim into uncharted, scary waters, but it also knows that you can do it, not just by yourself but with a family of unconditionally supportive found family members around you, and that you make the move to letting your heart rule your head that you might just find your best life waiting for you.