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[TURKISH] When Grief Takes Shape scrap
by
Sümeyra Buran
September 7, 2026
![[TURKISH] When Grief Takes Shape 이미지](/fileDownload.do;jsessionid=1D9AC8DB43F60F923648ED1B9E01E374?srvFile=20260907181337551492.webp&usrFile=23.webp&target=default&width=100&height=100&folder=reviews)
Hayaletin Kalbi
First published in Korea in 2022, Lim Sunwoo’s collection of eight stories reached Turkish readers in 2026 as Hayaletin Kalbi, translated by Tayfun Kartav. In the collection’s title story, the narrator observes a version of herself step outside of her body before confessing: “The fact that I had not actually died left me deeply disappointed.” That sentence introduces the book’s central question: What happens when the body keeps going, but the heart has already started to leave the world? Throughout the collection, this tension between being alive and actually feeling alive becomes a recurring theme.
Many of Lim’s characters are alive, but have withdrawn from life. Grief, insecure jobs, broken relationships, family pressure, and lost dreams have taken a toll on them. The ghosts, mutant jellyfish, rooted bodies, and hibernating people do not provide an escape from reality. Instead, they give hidden emotions a visible form. In Hayaletin Kalbi, the fantastic does not erase sorrow. It gives sorrow a body, a voice, or simply a place to rest.
“Hayaletin Kalbi” (“With the Heart of a Ghost”) follows a bakery worker whose boyfriend, Jeongsu, has been in a coma for two years. Unlike many stories that would seek out the miracle, Lim rejects that possibility. Jeongsu does not wake up. Ultimately, the woman is waiting not because she still hopes for love but because she does not know how to leave. The story is strong precisely because it offers no solution to the suffering of the woman. Even though a ghost appears in the story, it does not offer her a solution to her sorrow but makes it impossible for her to continue avoiding it.
These stories place grief directly inside the body. “Işık Saçmıyor” (“You’re Not Glowing”) and “Yaz, Suyun Rengi Gibi” (“Summer, Like the Color of Water”) both locate transformation as an intermediary phase between disappearance and rejuvenation. In the first story, an invasion of jellyfish generates an ominous industry where people wish to disappear. Services such as contracts, caretaking, and cleaning make that dream into a business. However, one of the jellyfish reconnects the narrator to her music career which she had abandoned. In the latter story, San plants himself in the floor after a breakup as a manifestation of his grief. The narrator can’t rescue him, but she can pull down the curtain, offer him water, and be beside him. Both stories ask what it means to stay with someone when there is no clear way to help. Lim’s answer is modest: Sometimes care can consist of water, shade, music, or company.
“Kış Uykusundaki Adam” (“The Hibernating Guy”) uses the motif of retreat to make a socio-political commentary: While everybody else works and pays their rent, who has the privilege of sleeping throughout winter? “Alaska Değil Ama” (“Even Though It’s Not Alaska”) transforms a tale of vengeance into one of bereavement that blurs the boundaries between human and animal. Here, the wish to disappear is tied not only to grief but also to money, work, housing, and exhaustion. Lim never lets private pain float free from its material conditions.
The last story, “Alkışa Çıkmak, Uzatmalar, Büyük Final” (“Curtain Call, Extra Inning, Last Pang”), provides a definitive response to that question. Granted one hundred hours of life after death, the narrator takes Irang to a specific stage in her life. Through this process, the narrator comes to realize that the disappearance of another person is still important. In Lim’s universe, perhaps this is the clearest indication of a living heart. The ending does not offer a grand return to life. It suggests something smaller and more believable: Caring about another person may be enough to remind us that some part of us still endures.
Lim writes in a quiet, matter-of-fact style that is at times even humorous, and Kartav’s Turkish translation fluently recreates Lim’s rhythm and detachment. Ghosts and physical transformations coexist with bakery counters, hospital beds, unpaid bills, domestic work, and unemployment. Occasionally, the narrative follows a familiar pattern. An emotionally numb individual encounters the inexplicable and gradually returns to life, making certain conclusions rather predictable. Nonetheless, Lim never insists on the healing of her characters. Hayaletin Kalbi does not exhort weary individuals to stay strong. It stays beside them. Here, care is not a cure but a refusal to turn away from those who are fading away. This is also where Lim succeeds in her writing. She never forces emotions or overexplains. Rather, she leaves everything to the ordinary details and the reader’s imagination.
Writer 필자 소개
Sümeyra Buran
Sümeyra Buran is an assistant professor of English at South Carolina State University and specializes in Anglo-American fiction and world literature, with a specific focus on science fiction and speculative fiction.
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