The Disaster Tourist by Yun Ko-eun 💣
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🏖️ The plot: Yona Ko is a programme designer at Jungle, a tourism agency for people who want to visit disaster sites. Every day she sifts through the worst news the world has to offer to put together travel packages. Burnt out by her job and by sexual harassment from her boss, she accepts the chance to go on a trip herself to Mui, a small island that was the site of a massacre in the 1960s. But when a minor disaster of her own causes her to overstay her original itinerary, Yona realises there could be a bigger one on the horizon...

The Disaster Tourist is a novel that is very interested in the idea of responsibility and the individual versus the collective. Yona is an isolated character at the beginning, committed to the collective security of the company she works for and unable to break rank, even when it appears that her employer is turning on her. This only intensifies as she gets stranded in Mui, but eventually Yona realises how dangerous following orders can be, how little safety it earns you from a higher authority that sees you only as a resource. I really felt the bind Yona was in throughout, how scary it is to strike out individually or take responsibility for your actions when so much of your life relies on the system you're rejecting.

That said, I found this a really odd read! The first half of the novel felt like a report of a pretty crap holiday, and it wasn't until things started to unravel halfway through that I was really hooked. I think this must have been a tough one to translate, so I wonder if the matter-of-fact prose was partly the issue? Overall I found this very thought-provoking and quite well-crafted by the end, but not super readable!

🏖️ Read it if you like novels that explore the way work culture affects the broader themes of our lives, and novels that definitely don't romanticise travel. This is a pretty cynical book!

🚫 Avoid it if you're not feeling in the mood for a nihilistic novel! This book does not have a happy ending!! 

 Yona gets coerced into a work trip by her employer, a company called Jungle, who specialise in disaster packages. It goes just as well as you suspect it will and then gets even worse than that. 

I really enjoyed this one: clever critique of the tourism industry that's sprung up around death (natural disasters, genocide, serial killers, "voluntourism" etc). The way that complicity in terrible things is written off by multiple characters because they're only playing their little part feels real and I loved the ending. I did think the romance was a little silly though.