Long story short, I have this book for four years, and during my reading slump period, I had this urge to read and I chose this book, specifically because I was sorry for it because it has been sitting in my bookshelf for too long. I didn’t expect myself to actually finish the book, actually. But here we are, writing another book review in the middle of the night!

Please note that this review is just a post-reading-ramble, so please don’t expect anything fancy. Also this is not spoiler free! If you don’t mind, then let’s go!

Let’s start with the book. It is titled “I’ll Be Right There” in English, or “어디선가 나를 찾는 전화벨이 울리고” in Korean, written by the very same author of “Please Look After Mum”, Shin Kyung Sook. When I bought this, I didn’t know she wrote that! This book was published in 2010, and its English translation in 2014, translated by Sora Kim-Russel. If you want a synopsis, please go to the book’s Goodread’s page, hehe.

When I was copying this information from Wikipedia, I found that the title is interesting. Its Korean title is “어디선가 나를 찾는 전화벨이 울리고” (eodiseonga nareul channeun jeonhwaberi ulligo) or, roughly, “Somewhere, a phone that looked for me rang” while its English title is “I’ll Be Right There.”

If you have read this, the book opened with the protagonist’s telephone rang and it ended with her saying “I’ll be right there.” I don’t know whether this is intentional or not, but this is fascinating.

Warning, lit student overanalyzing ramble ahead. 

If we understand both Korean and English, I think we can take this as a foreshadowing to the protagonist’s ending.

At the prologue, somewhere, a phone that looked for the protagonist rang. It was the protagonist’s phone, Jung Yoon’s phone, and the caller was her old friend slash ex-boyfriend, telling her that their beloved professor was dying in the hospital. At the end of the phone call, the boyfriend, Myungsuh, asked her, “Can I come over?” to which Yoon answered, “I’ll figure it out.”

At the epilogue, Yoon finally gathered herself to read her ex-boyfriend notebook, which had been given to her since ages ago, before they stopped seeing each other. In this notebook was Myungsuh’s POV of the story; things that he kept from Yoon, things that he thought were interesting, things that were private. At the end of the notebook, he wrote his wish to be able to move in with Yoon. Reading this, Yoon scribbled out an answer below it: i’ll be right there.

The story opened with Yoon’s phone ringing out of the blue, and it ended with her writing her answer, both to Myungsuh’s notebook and the phone call at the beginning of everything. I’ll be right there. She would be right there. It suggests a vague happy ending right from the start; that there will be indeed light waiting for her in the future. From the beginning of the book, we were told that Yoon despised the word ‘someday’, because she thought, with her mother’s passing, there wouldn’t be any someday for her. Yet, as the story progressed, Yoon started to believe in ‘someday’ again—for example, when she promised Miru, her friend, that they will go overseas together.

I’ll be right there means she would come there, wherever she needed to go. Even though the writer didn’t specify whether Yoon actually went back together with Myungsuh or not, the old Yoon, who didn’t believe in a better future, was gone and replaced by this older and happier version of her.

This is the end of the overanalyzing ramble. Let’s talk about something else.

The setting is 1980s South Korea, and the publishing people who were in charge of the blurb wrote “…amid the tremors of political revolution…” and as if it was a warning for the reader, there were some typical violence and distressing events happening in the story.

I was reading Han Kang’s “Human Acts” before this, and I thought “I’ll Be Right There” would be a lighter book because technically it’s a coming-of-age book. I didn’t know what made me think like that, though. This book was emotionally draining in some way—each character’s story was sad, I didn’t know how to explain it better.

There were people missing, people killing themselves, people resigning because they were not strong enough, people who were mentally exhausted—there was Jung Yoon, trying her best to survive. And she did survive until the end.

This is cheesy as fuck, I don’t know why I write that.

There’s this professor character who reminded me of my own lecturer, except I don’t know why I thought of him in the first place. For instance, their ages are not the same. Their physical descriptions aren’t the same either. It’s just…their vibe. I don’t know. Perhaps this is just my subconscious telling me that I missed his classes (or any of my uni classes in general. Except linguistics.)

At last, please give this book a try! I gave this 4 stars out of 5, because I surprised myself for liking this more than I intended. It was a good and enjoyable read.