Category: South Korea Page 1 of 2

The latest addition to my website is Un Su Kim‘s 벗 캐비닛 (The Cabinet). This is a wildly inventive novel, telling of Deok-geun Kong, a South Korean office worker, who gets involved in a project to document all cases of symptomers, those people who show signs of abnormal behaviours. These range from people who survive on a diet of petrol or glass or even electricity, to those who meet their doppelgängers, from those who lose several months or even years of their life to those who rewrite their memories and a host of others showing anomalous behaviour. Kong’s boss, Professor Kwon has a theory – that they represent a new species evolving from Homo sapiens. But are they just lonely people in the big city? However, Kwon is dying and Kong is not keen to carry on the work, while the evil Syndicate will do anything to get hold of the papers.

The latest addition to my website is Hye Young-Pyun‘s 선의 법칙 (The Law of Lines). This is another first-class novel from the South Korean writer. It tells the tales of two young women who both have tragedies. In one case her house burns down and her father is badly burned and later dies. In the other case, a teacher’s half-sister kills herself. Both women feel someone is to blame for what happened and both set out to investigate. Inevitably the two stories intersect. The root cause seems to be poverty and what people do to escape it, not always making wise decisions. Indeed, as well as the two women and the two victims, we see quite a few others who suffer and, in some cases, die because of the poverty trap. It may be grim, as are his other books, but it is a very well-told tale, with twists and unexpected turns.

The latest addition to my website is Hwang Sok-yong‘s 해질무렵 (At Dusk). This is a superb book about an architect who, though successful, is a bit lost in his life, his wife having left him, his friends dying and his increasing concern about declining values. He receives a note asking him to phone a number – that of his old girlfriend he has not seen for years. At the same time we follow the story of a twenty-something would-be theatre director and playwright. It is not going well for her and she has to supplement her income working the graveyard shift at a convenience store. She has an enigmatic friend, whose mother she meets, but considers her life hopeless. These two stories eventually merge, of course. Part of the novel is about the changes (for the worse) in South Korea over the years and part simply about two people who are struggling to fit in.

The latest addition to my website is Yi Mun-Yol‘s 아우와의만남 (An Appointment with My Brother; later: Meeting with My Brother), a new translation of a book that was previously published in English as An Appointment with My Brother. It is partially based on the life of the author. In real life, his father defected to North Korea during the Korean War, leaving his wife and three children. The family never saw him again but later learned he had married and had five children. In this book, the protagonist, Professor Yi, plans a meeting with his father in Yanji, a Chinese town just over the border from North Korea. He hires an intermediary to make contact but, before the father is tracked own, he has died. Instead, as the title tells us, he meets his half-brother instead. Not surprisingly, relations between the two half-brothers from two related but very different countries are not entirely easy. Yi Mun-Yol, one of Korea’s foremost writers, tells a superb story of a country separated by ideology and the problems this causes for families, without being mawkish or overly sentimental.

The latest addition to my website is Hwang Jungeun‘s 百의 그림자 (One Hundred Shadows). This is a very original work, which has had considerable success in South Korea, about very ordinary people in South Korea, whose shadows behave erratically. This may mean rising up or even detaching themselves from their owners. There is no obvious reason for this and, indeed, it can be read literally, as a sort of fantasy about shadows. However, it does seem to occur when the individuals concerned are undergoing some sort of stress. The story is about two young people, who have both dropped out of school and now work in small businesses located in a huge market shed in a poorer part of town. He – Mujae – works for a man making transformers and she – Eungyo – works for man who repairs electronic appliances. Despite their apparent attraction for one another and their ongoing friendship, their romance does not progress but they do both have the shadow problem. Hwang Jungeun tells an excellent story with considerable sympathy for the poorer parts of society but it is the strange shadows and their erratic behaviour that makes this book so original. As far as I can determine this is the second book published by Tilted Axis Press, a press founded in 2015 that publishes the books that might not otherwise make it into English, for the very reasons that make them exciting to us – artistic originality, radical vision, the sense that here is something new. I look forward to more of their books.