I was really grabbed by the Sputnik Sweetheart excerpts provided, and felt that the chapters functioned exceptionally well as a standalone short story. While my understanding of the selection would undoubtedly be altered (and most likely improved) by an understanding of the text that envelops it, preceding information giving further dimension to Miu and her place in the novel’s larger world, I believe the limited view of the work as whole contains within it alone valuable multitudes (a testament to great storytelling). Miu, a culturally Japanese woman of Korean ethnic origin, is a woman grappling with a great internal struggle of identity: ethnic identity (in relation to her perception of the world around her) and a more personal, basic identity (goals, personality, and desires). We cannot purport to see Miu feel truly at home anywhere, even in her apartment, especially as the hospitality and novelty of her European setting begins to erode in her paranoia. In Japan, her home, she and her family exist as an isotope of a cultural “other,” while abroad she experiences heightened anxiety at her status as such a stark racial outsider in the excerpt’s European society. Ferdinando, the fulcrum over which Miu’s sexual (and therefore more internal) conflict is balanced and explored, exists as the crystallization of the internal and external, international and domestic, the push and pull between what she may sexually be craving and what she is repulsed by. He is the most important element of the excerpt—all dilemmas entangled in one bound mechanism. His tall, darker, hairier body posits him completely outside the realm of Miu’s native social conventions of attractiveness, and in this he represents an international experience. He is sexually forward and charged, with his thick fingers and “mammoth penis,” and even portrayed as something barbaric/ overly carnal or animalistic, his member likened to a “sleeping animal” and his interactions with Miu’s double greedy and extremely involved, the other Miu letting him do “whatever he wants” to her body. Does Miu reject clung-to cultural safeties (or what she has grown to view as safeties) in order to explore this foreign man and what he could offer? Her double—a possibility—certainly does, and thus is Miu’s persona completely split in two: that which is unable or unwilling to step fully into this new international scape and adapt to a new set of conventions and behaviors (and is therefore disgusted by Ferdinando and the other Miu’s intercourse), retaining her current identity and its accompanying struggles, and that which freely opens herself to this scape’s expectations and advances, thereby relinquishing her old self and intentionally stepping into a new identity.
Ryan
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