What a gorgeous book.
This is one of those lit fic novels where multiple intersecting characters crash into one another through some unexpected event, and find that they have more in common than they expected. 
Kyoko is a young singer and illustrator, full of art and rage. In particular, she loves making music with her boyfriend Kornell, and she hates a moderately successful classical musician named Daniel. Man years ago, Daniel was the lover of Kyoko’s mom. Kyoko’s mom is dead, and Kyoko blames Daniel. He needs to be punished.
Daniel doesn’t know Kyoko, but agrees he is guilty and needs to be punished. However, he thinks he is guilty of ruining the life of another former lover, Alma. They’ve been disconnected for decades, but a recent Facebook message from Alma has him obsessing. Alma is also a musician, but MS has left her largely unable to play the cello.
With an easy back-and-forth through perspective and time (via flashbacks), Min pushes the characters together, pulls them apart, mixes up their lives up to make something new.
An important note – The Fetishist was published posthumously. She died in 2019. Her daughter, Kayla Min Andrews, helped to finish the book. Ultimately, it was published in 2024. In the spirit of time in the novel, I was interested in the book’s end material in which Kayla Min Andrews discusses the feeling that her mother wrote about shortly before her death – a premonition that their time together wasn’t over: “I know this sounds very woo-woo crazy, but maybe not. I just know it’s not the end,” Katherine Min wrote. “I will, in all important ways, be here for you always and wherever you need me. We’ll find a way. I believe this.”
Kayla Min Andrews ultimately agreed. “Mom and I were never writers at the same time. She never knew me as a writer, not in my adulthood. But here I am, almost four years after her death, writing words that will appear with her words in a book….I believe Mom and I are experiencing it together. We are connecting in new and interesting ways.”
I’m so glad that, somehow, they were able to be with one another in that way, and to cocreate something so compelling. I felt it in the book while reading it, in the gentle mix of perspective, memory, and time.
