Areum is two years old when doctors first notice there is something wrong: he is aging faster than he should be, a result of a rare and uncurable disease. Ae-ran Kim's novel My Brilliant Life is told from Areum's perspective, as the now-16-year-old sets out to write his own story--and that of his parents--before he dies. "This is the story of the youngest parents with the oldest child," he writes in the first pages of this fictional memoir: the story of 32-year-old parents to a 16-year-old boy living in the dying body of an 80-year-old man.
My Brilliant Life, translated from the Korean by Chi-Young Kim, is an achingly beautiful story of a boy forced to come to terms with aging and death far earlier than any child should. More than that, though, it is that boy's attempts to share all that he has learned, all that he wants the world to know. "People say it's a miracle that I've lived this long.... But I believe that the larger miracle exists in the ordinary, in the living of an ordinary life and dying at an ordinary age. To me the miracles are my [family]... the middle of summer and the middle of winter." Kim's novel so perfectly captures the voice and sense of longing in young Areum that it is easy to forget that My Brilliant Life is a work of fiction. As Areum and his thoughts and feelings and family come to life on its pages, the novel delivers an important reminder that life is truly what one makes of it--even if, and sometimes especially when, that life is cut too short. --Kerry McHugh, blogger at Entomology of a Bookworm