In 2016, the writer You-Jeong Jeong published her fourth work entitled “El Buen Hijo,” a book that the Penguin Random House publishing house recently began to distribute in Colombia. In it, she writes about a teenager who could have been loved, could have been a swimmer, but misunderstanding led him to be a white shark.
The smell of blood is metallic. You may not feel the metal crawling inside your body, but there it is, the scent is there, as solid as a blade.
Not only sharks smell it, humans are also capable of perceiving it and, above all, of chasing it. This act is so instinctive that the human is not aware of what he is doing, in fact, he represses it in some mental cubicle. Otherwise, he surely couldn’t live with the certainty that he is human, but also demon.
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You-Jeong Jeong puts himself in the shoes of one of these sharks to write “The Good Son”, a crime novel in which doubt is the main protagonist, which is present in Yu Jin throughout the entire work: What I did yesterday? What happened years ago? Why is my mother dead in the hallway? Where is my aunt? What do i feel What will I feel? These questions cloud Yu Jin’s mind and cause a whirlwind of feelings and resentments that, little by little, take over his body and bring up a personality that he himself was not aware of.
This is how in “The Good Son”, the reader enters the mind of a teenager named Yu Jin, who wakes up one morning to find his mother dead. At first he is nothing more than a scared child, but at the same time there is something that does not fit, and it will not fit as long as the plot is told from Yu Jin’s tormented voice. He is an epileptic child who wanted to dedicate himself to swimming, and yet there is something else behind the coldness with which he assumes the death of his mother, and his lack of memory, and the way in which he laughs at movies that should shake him .
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What runs through Yu Jin’s veins is metal, and metallic are the short sentences with which You-Jeong Jeong describes the experiences of a human capable of smelling blood and pursuing it, of defining himself from it and, therefore so much, of living despite being condemned to incomprehension, even of the reader who has entered his mind.