Bluebeard's First Wife - by Seong-Nan Ha (Paperback)

About the Book

Ha looks closely at the sordid underbelly of suburbia in Bluebeard's First Wife, the latest from one of Korea's preeminent authors.

Book Synopsis

A Publishers Weekly Top Ten Book of 2020

Disasters, accidents, and deaths abound in Bluebeard's First Wife. A woman spends a night with her fiancé and his friends, and overhears a terrible secret that has bound them together since high school. A man grows increasingly agitated by the noise made by a young family living in the apartment upstairs and arouses the suspicion of his own wife when the neighbors meet a string of unlucky incidents. A couple moves into a picture-perfect country house, but when their new dog is stolen, they become obsessed with finding the thief, and in the process, neglect their child. The paranoia-inducing, heart-quickening stories in Ha's follow-up to the critically acclaimed Flowers of Mold will have you reconsidering your own neighbors.

Review Quotes

Praise for Bluebeard's First Wife

"Ha's outstanding collection delivers heavy doses of guilt, hope, and pain. . . . Dark, strange, and simultaneously cohesive and diverse, these stories show a superb writer in full force."--Publishers Weekly, Top Ten Book of 2020

"Despite a significant body count, Ha's provocative narratives never devolve into the maudlin, showcasing instead sly moments of macabre fascination and startling dark comedy."--Terry Hong, Booklist, starred review

"Ha Seong-Nan's stories unfold like folk tales. Their clear, tightly focused problems and the counterintuitive way characters go about solving them leave room for hubris to be punished, for ironies to click into place in their final moments. But, like the book's title, the premises in the Korean writer's second collection published in English are often red herrings, as Ha eschews even the kind of "happy" ending that the original Bluebeard story provided for far grimmer conclusions. As with her previous collection, last year's Flowers Of Mold, in Bluebeard's First Wife, Ha favors ruin and decay over tidiness, defying narrative expectations and crafting nightmarish visions that spark with dark energy."--Laura Adamczyk, The A.V. Club

"The stories in Bluebeard's First Wife, which is Korean literary star Ha Seong-nan's second collection to appear in English, skate on the edge of fairytale. . . . Ha's writing derives its strength not from updating or subverting known tropes, but from her ability to create--and Hong's ability to translate--an atmosphere so sinister it becomes impossible to tell the innocuous from the dangerous, the supernatural from the mundane."--Lily Meyer, NPR

"This beautiful collection of short stories takes us into the dark side of Seoul's suburbia, where petty resentments flare into unpredictable and shocking violence, and momentary lapses have long-lasting implications. Ha Seong-nan stunned me with her debut collection, Flowers of Mold, and her second set of stories to reach the US promises to be just as wondrous a combination of the horrifying and the banal."--Molly Odintz, CrimeReads

"Ha is not concerned with updating fairy-tales, she is not seeking to transport readers to a mythical realm. A concise lesson, the neat happy bow of a fairy-tale ending, is never offered. She instead uses myth to make visible the human condition--one marked by disappointment, loneliness, and loss."--Marta Balcewicz, Ploughshares

"After an acclaimed debut, Bluebeard's First Wife is a forceful and impressive second collection. These stories succeed in unsettling us, not only by exposing our worst nightmares about what lies behind forbidden doors, but also by asking us whose fault it was to enter. The answer is clear, isn't it?"--Hannah Weber, Words Without Borders

"In stark, unflinching prose, Ha plumbs feelings of isolation in a modern world in which characters often find themselves bent under the force of traditional expectations, with new dangers looming every day. This is a uniformly captivating collection of stories that could be incidents from a local paper, but which are no less haunting for it."--Kristen Allen-Vogel, Shelf Awareness

"In Bluebeard's First Wife, Ha explores big cities and small rural towns where ambition, familial responsibilities, and expectations of marriage coalesce to reveal hidden sides to neighbors, wives, and husbands. The ordinary lives of middle class peoples in such cities and towns gain fairy-tale quality as Janet Hong's translation renders Ha's uneasy stories with haunting details and precise prose."--Regina Lim, Berkeley Fiction Review

Praise for Ha Seong-nan

"These mesmerizing stories of disconnection and detritus unfurl with the surreal illogic of dreams--it's as impossible to resist their pull as it is to understand, in retrospect, how circumstance succeeded circumstance to finally deliver the reader into a moment as indelible as it is unexpected. Janet Hong's translation glitters like a blade."--Susan Choi

"Flowers of Mold shows Ha Seong-nan to be a master of the strange story. Here, things almost happen and the weight of their almost happening hangs over the narrative like a threat. Or they do happen, and then characters go on almost like they haven't, much to the reader's dismay. Or a story builds up and then, where most authors would pursue things to the last fraying thread of their narrative, Ha elegantly severs the rest of the story and delicately ties it off. And as you read more of these stories, they begin to chime within one another, creating a sense of deja-vu. In any case, one is left feeling unsettled, as if something is not right with the world--or, rather (and this latter option becomes increasingly convincing), as if something is not right with you."--Brian Evenson

"Be forewarned: it might make you reconsider your interest in your neighbors, because it could lead to obsession and madness--or something odder and less reassuring than a tidy end, of which there are few in this wonderfully unsettling book of 10 masterful short stories.."--John Yau, Hyperallergic

"Ha lends a critical eye to capitalism, advertising, and gender in contemporary South Korea, and in each story, she combines the ordinary with the extraordinary to truly disquieting effect."--Rhian Sasseen, Paris Review

Joining a growing cohort of notable Korean imports, Ha's dazzling, vaguely intertwined collection of 10 stories is poised for Western acclaim."--Booklist, starred review

"This impressive collection reveals Ha's close attention to the eccentricities of life, and is sure to earn her a legion of new admirers."--Publishers Weekly, starred review

"Ha's ability to find startling traits in seemingly unremarkable characters makes each story a small treasure."--Shelf Awareness

About the Author

Ha Seong-nan is the author of five short story collections--including Bluebeard's First Wife and Flowers of Mold--and three novels. Over her career, she's received a number of prestigious awards, such as the Dong-in Literary Award in 1999, Hankook Ilbo Literary Prize in 2000, the Isu Literature Prize in 2004, the Oh Yeong-su Literary Award in 2008, and the Contemporary Literature (Hyundae Munhak) Award in 2009.

Janet Hong is a writer and translator based in Vancouver, Canada. Her work has appeared in Literary Hub, Asia Literary Review, Words Without Borders, and the Korea Times. Her other translations include Han Yujoo's The Impossible Fairy Tale and Ancco's Bad Friends.