Book Review: DALLERGUT DREAM DEPARTMENT STORE (2023) by Miye Lee
INSIPID: "Wanting in the qualities which affect the organs of taste; without taste or savor; vapid; tasteless."
That just about sums it up.
Perhaps something was lost in the translation from Korean to English, but this book felt synthetic ... as if it were computer-generated. (That certainly applies to the above book cover, too.) Nothing comes alive — not the characters, not the plot, not the setting.
It all comes off as flat, fake, simulated.
The main theme, a store that sells dreams, is weak and convoluted. It depicts a "dream marketplace" that seems to have insinuated itself into a space where it was never needed to begin with.
Why buy dreams? You can make them yourself. This novel tries to convince you that you need a middleman who sells your own imagination back to you.
There is no sense of conflict or real tension in the story, since it's all about affirming the "ordered" state of Dreamland. Because, you know, your imagination should be run by businessmen, like in this novel.
There is no chaos or disorder or depth or ambiguity. The "authority figure" characters are all-seeing and benevolent … which gets creepy in a way the author may not have intended.
Santa Claus appears as a character. It doesn't help.
Is this aimed at children? Then children deserve better literature.
Or… is this book some kind of subtle propaganda for a future to come, when we have apps inside our brains that sell us computer-generated dreams?
Avoid. And do all you can to make sure that nightmare vision never comes true.
Yep, this is precisely why I didn't come to the book club - I tried reading a few chapters of this generic drivel in the bookshop, but the book was so empty, pointless and synthetic that I felt I was reading AI slop.