Asian American Literature Fans

A Review of Min Kym’s Gone: A Girl, a Violin, a Life Unstrung (Crown, 2017).
By Stephen Hong Sohn



So before I started writing this review, I looked up Min Kym and listed to some of her exquisite performances online. What’s so interesting about Min Kym’s memoir Gone: A Girl, a Violin, a Life Unstrung (Crown, 2017) is that it explores the incredible attachment that the author possesses in relation to her musical instrument, a rare and almost priceless Stradivarius.

Here is a summary from B&N: “Her first violin was tiny, harsh, factory-made; her first piece was ‘Twinkle Twinkle, Little Star.’ But from the very beginning, Min Kym knew that music was the element in which she could swim and dive and soar. At seven years old, she was a prodigy, the youngest ever student at the famed Purcell School. At eleven, she won her first international prize; at eighteen, violinist great Ruggiero Ricci called her ‘the most talented violinist I’ve ever taught.’ And at twenty-one, she found ‘the one,’ the violin she would play as a soloist: a rare 1696 Stradivarius. Her career took off. She recorded the Brahms concerto and a world tour was planned. Then, in a London café, her violin was stolen. She felt as though she had lost her soulmate, and with it her sense of who she was. Overnight she became unable to play or function, stunned into silence. In this lucid and transfixing memoir, Kym reckons with the space left by her violin’s absence. She sees with new eyes her past as a child prodigy, with its isolation and crushing expectations; her combustible relationships with teachers and with a domineering boyfriend; and her navigation of two very different worlds, her traditional Korean family and her music. And in the stark yet clarifying light of her loss, she rediscovers her voice and herself.”

For Min, her particular Stradivarius allows her to find her most original and daring “violin voice,” if we might call it that. Prior to financing the purchase of Kym’s Stradivarius, the author details her upbringing as a violin prodigy, learning from gifted but equally temperamental instructors. Once Kym is connected with her Strad, her violin life truly reaches an acme. But, the memoir is hurtling toward a darker moment. When Kym is traveling, her violin is stolen, her life becomes “unstrung” as she describes it in the memoir’s subtitle.

For Kym, losing the violin is losing a part of herself, so she naturally becomes mired in a kind of depression, desperately hoping that she will be reunited with the instrument and perhaps that lost part of herself. Over time, she realizes that the theft of her violin may not be resolved, so she attempts to carve out other potential pathways in her career and in her life. She even buys a different Stradivarius, though she ultimately knows that this replacement is not the right violin for her. Eventually, the violin is recovered, but because of a complicated set of circumstances involving insurance and her own lack of funds, she cannot purchase the violin back. She is forced to see her beloved “self” be sold at auction. Kym’s memoir is particularly affecting because we can see how much melancholy exists but at this difficult locus of loss; she manages to make clear the unique bond between musicians and their instruments. 

Buy the Book Here!

Review Author: Stephen Hong Sohn
Review Editor: Gnei Soraya Zarook

If you have any questions or want us to consider your book for review, please don’t hesitate to contact us via email!
Prof. Stephen Hong Sohn at ssohnucr@gmail.com
Gnei Soraya Zarook, PhD Student in English, at gzaro001@ucr.edu