K-LIT REVIEW 'Bonobo' asks who is the noble beast?

"Bonobo," Jeong Yoo-jeong's latest book to be translated to English, does not pull punches.

Whether physical or emotional, battles are fought with animal intensity and have lasting impact. The most devastation punch of all, however, is how often we do nothing for someone in need. “I pretended I hadn’t heard,” and “Go ask someone else,” aren’t just quotes from the novel — they are the chorus of an unsympathetic world. Can the three main characters teach us how to help?

The book presents a well-worn sci-fi plot point: a transfer of conciousness from one body to another. A car crash throws the psyche of primatologist Jini into the mind of a bonobo. As she struggles to find her way back to her own body, Jini also experiences the primate's memories of captivity and trafficking, forcing her to reconsider the relationship between humans and animals.

As the book teaches us about bonobos through Jini, we also learn about her own self-doubt and skepticism regarding human nature. Who is a "noble beast, and who is a terrible animal? A moment of birth is a shared joy for a bonobo family and community. A crowd of people jeer and throw garbage at a bonobo. Bonobos and humans reflect each other in moments both tender and terrible.

Along with Jini, readers learn that “bonobos were the animals closest to humans in terms of feelings, empathy and memory,” and that like humans, bonobos experience a time of adolescent rebellion. Through these parallels, we feel a deeper sense of kinship with these gentle primates, and the novel utilizes that emotional investment to intensify our response to the characters.

Recognition of a failure to help someone can be transformative, but the resulting change is not always an improvement. Jini’s failure to help an animal in a moment of fear leads her to the conclusion that she isn’t qualified to help anyone and instills in her a distrust of people and institutions. How can we expect anyone to help us if we won’t help anyone? Family is expected to help, but when someone has no family — or worse, a family that rejects them — how does that change those expectations? Helping others isn’t natural but learned.

Minjoo, a drifter who helps Jini in her unlikely quest to reunite her body and mind, illustrates the effects of such rejection. His life is already marked by disappointment and purposelessness. He is cast out of his home by his father, who tells him, “If you had an ounce of shame, you would have left before I needed to tell you.” When caught trespassing in a park, his excuse is that he is lost — which is more than half-true. To conceal the embarassing truth from a police officer, Minjoo offers the more plausible story that he had planned to commit suicide. The response from a person who ostensibly serving the public is both absurd and entirely believable: “Are you aware of the penalty for trying to hang yourself there?” Institutional distrust is the only sane reaction.

The third character, a bonobo, has a shared past with Jini through which the author manages to take a familiar trope in a new and introspective direction. Though upsetting at times, her story stands both as a warning about our treatment of a close relative and as a metaphor for the cruelties we inflict on our own kind. Through body language and eye contact, we are taught how to see a call for help — even from the voiceless.

Translated by An Seon-jae, the book's descriptive style is intense and powerful. Moments of tension are used with great effect to draw the reader not just into the narrative but into a shared sensory experience. The processing of smells, sights and sounds creates the immediate world of an animal and the sensory barrage of the present moment. This is contrasted with slower moments of reflection on a possible future or a moment from the past. These scenes of high stress and visceral physicality create a palpable sense of empathy for the non-human characters. Our mouths water and our stomachs growl with theirs. As they are startled by terrible noises, our hair stands up. Jini’s understanding of primate behavior can be applied to humans and bonobos alike, and we as readers share their world.

Exploration of our shared needs is a persistent theme. Hunger and thirst are symptoms of an animal’s unfulfilled physical needs; feelings of loneliness and abandonment are symptoms of social isolation — a growing concern not only in Korea but in much of the world.

While some themes apply specifically to Korea, the novel’s larger concerns extend well beyond. A recurring theme is depersonalization, defined for the reader as “a symptom characterized by the feeling of being disconnected from oneself.” The term can be applied to characters in the novel, but is also familiar to many in our own society.

The story is not difficult to follow, but it can be difficult to process. From start to finish, it is original and gripping. At the end, we are exhausted — as we should be. Everyone needs help, and Jeong helps us by offering this guiding principle: “As long as you are alive, you have to do everything you can.”

The book is available through dbbooks.co.kr.

Arlo Matisz is an economics professor at Chosun University in Gwangju.