"In recent years East Asia has usurped Latin America as the lodestar of magic realism¡¦ Cheon Myeong-kwan¡¯s Whale, a novel of tycoons, ghosts and cinephiles that was first published in South Korea in 2003 and has now been translated into English by Chi-Young Kim, rides the crest of this wave¡¦ Told in an omniscient and playful narrative voice, smoothly translated by Chi-Young, this is a distinctly Korean take on Great Expectations, a tale of aspiration and folly punctuated with artisanal bricks and dried fish." ¡ª Financial Times
"A rich, fantastical tale..... unique and ambitious."
¡ª Buzz Magazine
"In tying together a series of fun, related anecdotes, Cheon cleverly spins a fantastical tale that also contains some unpalatable truths about not-so-distant Korean history £¿ and that¡¯s without even mentioning the man with the scar, the brickyard and the titular whale of a building."
¡ª Tony's Reading List
"A kaleidoscope of interlocking stories, all painted larger than life."
¡ª David's Book World
"A peerless work devoted to telling a powerful story and lauded for expanding Korean literature into new dimensions." ¡ª The Hankyoreh
"A novel that seduces." ¡ª JoongAng Ilbo
"[Whale] redefines what fiction can be."
¡ª The Kyunghyang Sinmun
"Whale overflows with freshness. That's what makes it special."
¡ª OhmyNews
¡°Fast-paced and imaginative.¡±
-- Dennis Maloney ¡ª Modern Family
¡°Whale has leaped over the boundaries of a novel and entered a new space, just like South American fiction.¡±
-- Shin Soo-jung (South Korean film star)
"There has never been a novel like this in Korean literature...A novel that's more like reading out loud than reading quietly to oneself; its structure is like that of a folktale. You can feel the oral tradition in the rhythm of the sentences."
¡ª Lee Dong-jin, critic