This week’s music is “” by Velvet Underground.

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Tune in next week for “,” which will cover through page 450. (Full schedule here.)

ąó´Ç±ô±ô´Ç·ÉĚýĚý,ĚýĚýandĚý for random thoughts and information about upcoming guests.

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To celebrate Women in Translation Month, we will be posting excerpts, readings, summaries from the Translation Database, former Two Month Review seasons, and various special offers—so stay tuned!

Today’s excerpt is fromĚýĚýby Hwang Jungeun, translated by Janet Hong as part of her . ( All three titles for $30!!!)Ěý

You might recognize Hwang Jungeun from her two Tilted Axis titles: (translated by Jung Yewon) andĚý (translated by Emily Yae Won). (Also, Open Letter will be publishing Hwang’s Ěýin the near future.)

And here’s the current copy forĚýYear After Year:

Three women—the old mother and her two daughters—contemplate their family life and their bottled-up feelings through the novel’s placating yet oddly unnerving prose.Ěý

Year After YearĚýis divided into four large chapters; the first unravels from the perspective of Sejin, younger daughter, the second from that of Youngjin, older daughter, the third from the mother’s, and the fourth, back to Sejin’s. Throughout the course of the novel, a number of themes are developed, including its discussion of interracial marriage, different forms of family, and sexual minorities. Circumstances and history forced the mother to the life of obedience, familial obligations and financial hardship forced Youngjin to give up her dream and support the family, and the reality of her culture forced Sejin to be in the closet. And all the while, these three women, while empathizing with each other, seem entrapped in the cycle of forcing each other to further succumb.

Year After Year is available for purchase from better bookstores everywhere, , , or you get your books.Ěý

Gravedig

After the Chuseok holiday, before the ground freezes.

So Yi Sunil had said numerous times, and now the time had come. It was the second week of November. At six o’clock in the morning, Han Sejin got in her car and sped along the mostly empty Olympic Highway and arrived at Sunil’s apartment. She pulled up to the shuttered garage and turned off the engine. Her seat chilled almost immediately. The day was bitter cold. It would get a little warmer when the sun rose fully, but they were heading toward the Military Demarcation Line (MDL), where the temperature, even at midday, was lower than during nights in the city. It was the same every year.

Sejin peered down at the cracked, uneven surface of the parking lot and retied her hair. She went up to the fourth floor. Sunil was waiting, everything already packed. Containers of mung bean pancakes, stuffed chili peppers, and stir-fried beef were stacked inside a paper shopping bag, along with some apples and pears, and a bottle of liquor. Next to the bag sat a smaller backpack. She’d said she wanted to use plates this time. Not Styrofoam or aluminum foil trays, but real plates, since this visit was to be their last. As soon as Sejin picked up the backpack, it sagged under the weight of the dishes, and there was a clatter.

They’re going to break. You don’t care?

Why would they break? They won’t, as long as you’re careful, Sunil said, adding, I’m bringing them back.

Sejin said no more and carried the bags down.

*

She loaded the bags in the trunk and spread out a blanket in the backseat. She started the car and turned on the heat. When Sunil finally appeared from the entrance of the mid-rise, Sejin was crouched in front of the car, examining the ground. Two rusted screws, dull and as fat as a thumb, protruded from the surface. They were all that remained of the parking barrier. Her brother-in-law had installed it to prevent people from parking illegally in their lot, but it must have been a hassle for him and the tenants to get in and out, because it was removed one day, leaving behind these two screws anchored deep into the ground. They weren’t too sharp, but sharp enough to puncture a tire if a car drove over them at a certain angle. On her last visit, Sejin had mentioned they could be dangerous, and Sunil had said she’d relay the message.

They’re still here, Sejin said, standing up.

Sunil frowned, shaking her head.

Did that mean she’d told her son-in-law, but he’d done nothing? Or that she hadn’t mentioned it yet, because she hadn’t found the right time to bring it up? Without asking any of these things, Sejin helped Sunil into the backseat, taking the duralumin cane from her and stowing it in the trunk. She then removed Sunil’s right shoe, helping her prop her leg onto the center console and covering her swollen knee with a blanket. Sunil was wearing a wool cap with a small brim, a pair of thick quilted trousers, a red-and-brown cardigan in a dizzying pattern, and a skinny knit scarf wrapped around her neck.

You won’t get cold dressed like that?

Sunil said she had on many layers underneath and patted her belly. She’d also packed hiking boots, which she’d found stored neatly in a box. They belonged to Sejin’s older sister, Yeongjin, who hadn’t touched them after using them once. Though they were a little big, as long as Sunil put on an extra pair of socks before setting out, they should fit just fine. At last, they left.

*

Hwang Jungeur

They headed northeast. If they traveled 100 kilometers an hour, they would arrive at their destination in two and a half hours. Grandfather’s grave was in Jigyeong-ri village, in the town of Galmal of Cheorwon County, Gangwon Province. Both women called him Grandfather, but he was actually Sunil’s grandfather, which made him Sejin’s great-grandfather. He was buried deep in the mountain where a frontline military unit was stationed. The graves of other Jigyeong-ri residents lay scattered over the mountain as well. They needed to pass through the military base in order to access the graves. And so, every year around Chuseok, villagers gathered in front of the base, carrying sickles and bundles of food. After leaving their IDs at the checkpoint, they hiked up the mountain to hold memorial ceremonies in honor of their ancestors, each family escorted by one or two armed soldiers. From the mid-eighties, Sunil visited her grandfather’s grave every year without fail, but once Sejin got her driver’s license and a car of her own, Sunil went with her daughter. When Chuseok drew near, Sunil would give an old neighbor from the village a call and ask when everyone was planning to head up the mountain. Then she’d call Sejin and update her on that year’s visit.

Hey, let’s have some gotgam.

Sunil pulled off the end and tore the dried persimmon in two. She held it out toward Sejin, who accepted it without taking her eyes off the road. The car continued to glide forward. The sun was rising, and to their right, the mountain fog was creeping down toward the rice paddies spread below. Sejin said they weren’t going to be late after all, since there was no traffic on the roads, but Sunil was worried the workers had headed up the mountain already, and said they should have set out earlier.

We need to make the last offering before they start digging.

Sunil was born in Galgol, north of Jigyeong-ri, but after she lost her parents, she went to live with her grandfather in Jigyeong-ri. Some of her relatives had disappeared without a trace in the border clashes that took place along the 38^th parallel during the Korean War, and her grandfather, her only remaining next of kin, took the five-year-old Sunil in, raising her and getting her to run errands for him. When she was fifteen, she was sent to live with a distant relative in Gimpo, and there she helped at a market until she married Han Jungeon, in a match arranged by one of the merchants. Sunil liked to tell Sejin how she’d never in her wildest dreams expected her grandfather to make the long, inconvenient journey to see her get married, but he’d come after all, dressed in his worn traditional coat. He’d sat in the wedding hall for a bit, eaten some noodles, and then left.

Grandfather passed away in Jigyeong-ri in 1978. At the crack of dawn, three or four men from the village had shouldered his coffin and buried him halfway up the mountain. Sejin had never met him, but she knew what he looked like. A framed photo of him hung on the wall of Sunil’s apartment, along with their family pictures. In the shot taken head-on, he had a scruffy beard and wore a fabric skullcap over coarse, white hair. Just from his face and expression alone, one could tell he was very short, and that his forehead, eyebrows, eyes, and nose were round, like Sunil’s. He seemed like someone Sejin had met many times, perhaps because she’d grown up staring at his picture her entire life. So she visited his grave every year, feeling as if she were looking in on him. But before this, Sunil had made the trip on her own, changing buses several times. Neither Jungeon nor her older daughter Yeongjin had any desire to accompany her, and Mansu, her only son and the youngest of her children, had been too young or hadn’t known the way to the gravesite to go with her.

Why go through all that trouble every year?

Janet Hong

Yeongjin and Jungeon couldn’t understand why Sunil went to such lengths to visit her grandfather’s grave. How could they possibly know about the dried-up burrows or the shrubs draped occasionally with snakes, and how, in just a year, the weeds would have grown as tall as a person that they’d have to hack them down with a sickle in order to pass through? Or about the moss and the trees twisted from lack of sunlight, the burial mound crushed and trampled by wild boars, the chestnut trees surrounding the grave, or the silence of pine trees? Sejin alone knew the reason why Sunil went up the mountain every year, cutting a path through the forest. It was her home. For her mom, that grave was her childhood home.

Grandfather, I’m a granny now. I don’t know if I’ll be able to come next year.

For the past few years, this is what Sunil has been saying at the graveside, but this visit was truly her last. She was seventy-two years old and planned to have knee replacement surgeries in both knees next year. Once a child of the mountains, she’d been surefooted on steep terrain, harvesting fiddleheads and young shoots off angelica trees, but now she needed a cane even on flat land, and she walked slowly, grimacing from the pain. She’d held out for several years, saying each time it was her last, but she couldn’t manage the wild rugged terrain anymore and had finally accepted the truth earlier this year. After worrying about Grandfather’s resting place that would lie deserted deep in the mountains, she resolved to dig up his remains and get rid of the grave altogether. After all, no one would visit him once she was gone.

Year After Year is available for purchase from better bookstores everywhere, , , or you get your books.Ěý

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I Am a Season That Does Not Exist in the WorldĚýby Kim Kyung-Ju
translated from the Korean by Jake Levine
144 pgs. | pb |9781939568144 | $14.95

Reviewed by Jacob Rogers

Kim Kyung Ju’s I Am a Season That Does Not Exist in the World, translated from the Korean by Jake Levine, is a wonderful absurdist poetry collection. It’s a mix of verse and prose poems, or even poems in the forms of plays, all of which make use of what could most simply be termed an overriding sense of “synesthesia.” Throughout the collection, Kyung Ju mixes up sensorial language, whether that which we use to describe our bodies, or the world around us. What results is a fascinating defamiliarization and confusion of the way we use language to describe our lives, what we feel and experience, in a fever-dreamlike onslaught of vivid, visceral images.

Not simply interesting for their absurdity, these moments of confusion are also so well-rendered that they still feel somehow realistic and tangible. Jake Levine’s skillful translation of the collection must have been monstrously difficult, as it’s bursting at the seams with wordplay, assonance, consonance, and rhyme, with sumptuous, gorgeous language as fascinating for its absurdity as for its clarity. On top of the sensory confusion, Kyung Ju also weaves in a mix-up of the way we describe various forms of art: tactile or olfactory words for music, auditory words for painting, and so on.

In fact, one of the collection’s recurring themes is that of music as an allegory for human life. To cite just one: “In my previous life I was not human. I was music . . . Beethoven didn’t compose music. Beethoven was music. What he recorded was only his desperation.” In evoking one of the most famous classical composers, the suggestion seems to be that there is transcendent beauty to be found in the sublimation of our experiences, emotions, and sensations into art, blurring the lines between where the art and person begin and end.

He further clarifies and expands upon the synesthesia in the collection with a third layer. Not just a mixing of senses, or of the senses related to art, he also blends the art forms themselves. Though the collection contains a large amount of prose-poems (another kind of line-blurring), the true moments of confusion come with poems like, “The Moment After the Rain Hits, We Hug a Rainbow and Enter a Hotel with an Old Bathub.” Beginning as a poem, it moves on to Act I, II, and III—the first two still in verse, and the last of which takes the form an absurd dialogue between “Man” and “Kim” (ostensibly Kim Kyung Ju himself). It is a short, confusing back and forth where Kim wonders if Man is his son, and the issue is never clarified, but ends with Man carrying Kim on his back, pretending to be a plane, as if reversing the possible father-son connection.

Child-parent bonds, too, are an important theme in the collection, with countless references to “Mom” and “Dad.” In fact, the often shadowy presence of Mom may even contain the root to the work’s absurdity. In some rare moments, she shows up as a tragic figure in his life: “Mom, please stop dribbling . . . Turning on your side, purple bedsores pop;” she is dying before his eyes. These moments are often surrounded by language that juxtaposes absence and presence, as well as confusing, contradictory, or nonsensical sentences. On top of being paradoxical, there’s a sense of avoidance when he says “like a love for mom that never existed, my sorrow begins,” like a child shaking its head no at something to make it untrue, like the speaker wanting to negate the love in order to avoid the pain. However, in the collection’s penultimate poem, “A City of Sadness,” over ten pages long, the speaker rambles on and on about music and life and poetry only to end, finally, with a surreal scene:

the people that were entering the water that were carrying the coffin all had the same face as my own . . . But then, I wondered, in the coffin whose body was laid? I ran and ripped away the flowers covering the coffin . . . There, laid to rest, was my mom . . . Instead of her head, my head rest in the arms of my decapitated mother’s corpse. My face had my mother’s smile.”

With this fever-dreamlike ending, Kyung Ju finally takes a deep dive into the sorrow surrounding the sickness and death of the speaker’s mother, illuminating all the anxiety, confusion, and absurdity of such an event.

The subsequent, chaotic search for meaning, understandings of oneself, of the world, of art, are jumbled up, resulting in a language as absurd as the thought of losing one’s mother: a language parallel to and yet divorced from reality as we know it. This collection seeks new language, new ways to signify art and life out of the tumult, sublimating absurdity itself in its effort to explore this new language. That this language is so beautiful, so vivid, so familiar and familial, despite all its apparent absurdity, is a testament to both Kyung Ju’s skill as a writer and Levine’s light-footed, wonderful translation. What results is a readable, tragicomically absurd text that’s worth countless re-readings.

In the book’s opening chapters, the narrator—who remains unnamed—falls into an icy river in the suburbs of Berlin. A Korean writer and student living in Germany, she begins to look back over the years, blurring lines between past and present as she examines her relationship with Joachim, her on-and-off, working class boyfriend, and M, her German tutor, a refined and enigmatic young woman she’s in love with. The contrast between these two partners and the tensions around language and class are fascinating, but I had a hard time just getting past how gorgeous the writing was.

The narrator describes M, setting the scene for their many discussions of music and language, “The rain water trickled down M’s pale, almost ghost-like forehead, down over her eyelids, still more sunken after her recent cold, and over her slightly-downward pointed nose. When she tilted her head upward, her lips appeared unbelievably thin and delicate, tapering elegantly even when she wasn’t smiling, flushed red as though suffused by the morning sunlight. The delicate, languidly prominent scaffolding of her cheekbones . . . If books and language were the symbol of M’s absolute world, then music was her inaccessible mind, her religion, her soul.”
The narrative is constantly shifting, pliable, and fluid, in both tense and setting. The construction seems effortless, allowing the narrator to sift through her life, her relationships, and most importantly the end of her relationship with M to find closure in it all. Her memory, one can’t forget, is imperfect—an approximation and perhaps a reinvention.

The style of the writing evokes the very music that seems to drive the story. Smith in an interview with Tobias Carroll for Vol. 1 Brooklyn stated, “When I was translating her, the thing that I was most aware of was trying not to smooth out the weirdness too much. . . . It becomes quite hypnotic when you read it in Korean, and quite lyrical in places as well. She writes a lot about music, and the other thing that her style evokes is that. It’s more about the cadence of the sentence. The core book itself, the structure, is more about variations on a theme, and coming back to certain motifs rather than a straight chronology.”

Thankfully for readers, Bae Suah is prolific and Deborah Smith seems determined to bring these great books to English language readers.

by Jung Young Moon, translated from the Korean by Mah Eunji and Jeffrey Karvonen (Dalkey Archive Press)

I’ve been reading Jung Young Moon’s A Contrived World in preparation for an upcoming class (we’ll be talking about his Vaseline Buddha) and god damn do I love this book. Why, you ask? Here are three quotes, starting with the longest one, the one mentioned on the forthcoming Three Percent Podcast:

Before I begin to list the things that I think are fun, I would like to take a moment to list the things that I do not consider fun: noises of all kinds, nearly every kind of music, violent things, depression, conventional works of fiction, fiction that reflects the times, novels that discuss scars, consolation and healing, novels in which characters’ actions weigh more than their thoughts, grandiose novels, touching novels (perhaps speaking of the dull nature of the critics who fawn over such novels could be somewhat fun, but not really, so let us just say that the reason for their behavior is that they either have no talent as critics or have no self-esteem as human beings, or both), growth novels, all-too-serious novels, novels that don’t exude an excess of self-consciousness, proverbial poems, things explained by common sense, obvious ploys (and those responsible for them), flawless people, people with nothing peculiar about them, people whose entire being exudes authority, people who are diligent and eager, people who want to contribute to society, people who have no interest in clouds, simple folk, talkative people, overly greedy people, people who know jokes but are without humor, unspeakably dull people who make me speechless (they are really dull), racial chauvinists, self-conscious women who act coy while pretending to be nonchalant (such women can be found everywhere in the world, but more so in Korea than anywhere else; since there has never been formal research, their exact number is unknown, but it is certainly more than the number of a certain species of near-extinct penguins in the South Pole), men who show off their strength and manliness (such men also exist in large numbers in South Korea; among them are those who tense up and crack their bulked-up necks noisily and walk with an exaggerated swagger; such a man might be a good match for a self-conscious woman who acts coy while pretending to be nonchalant), conservatives, and economic issues. I could probably add to this list endlessly. (Adding endlessly to this list is sometimes fun and sometimes dull.)

This sort of list-making gets me right away, especially when I a) generally agree with the observations, and b) these observations are entertaining without becoming too cutesy. Another thing that sucks me in? Talk about hobos.

He told me this and that about hobos. The world has its share of people who talk without being asked, and he seemed to be one of them. He told me that drifters are people who roam from one place to the next, and that drifters can be divided into tramps, who only work when absolutely necessary; bums, who never work and are not so different from beggars; and hobos, who find work as they roam. He said that hobos have held an annual American hobo convention since 1900, and that hobos have their own code of ethics, which prescribes that they must help other hobos in difficult situations, and have control over their own lives. Hobo culture is a weighty subject matter in American literature. Many authors, including Jack Kerouac, Jack London, Eugene O’Neill, and John Steinbeck, lived as hobos and wrote about hobos, coining numerous new terms, such as possum belly, a term that describes free-riders lying flat on their bellies on the roof of a train car so as not to be swept away by the wind. The hobo added that San Francisco is like a holy ground for hobos. These were all things I’d read about hobos. I listened carefully and quietly to catch inaccurate information, but everything he said checked out. It was as if he had memorized the content of some hobo manual.

These two quotes pretty much capture the tone and nature of this book. The narrator/author is in America, things happen around him, he reflects on them in an entertaining, occasionally insightful way, and the narrative follows his eccentric train of thought. It’s a real joy to read—exactly what I’ve been looking for. And since I’m sort of childish, I’ll close with a quote that’s a bit sillier and more juvenile than the ones above.

I would have liked to put my underwear back on and move on to something normal, but it suddenly occurred to me that I must not have let out a respectable fart since my buttock had become so unsightly. It seemed only logical that a person with a nice-looking butt would fart respectably. In order to test this theory, I tried solemnly to fart, to see what sort of unrespectable fart would come out, but I couldn’t break wind. I wished to release several farts in a row, rather than letting out one lousy fart, but there was nothing. I was angry at the gas that would not be released. My failed attempt reaffirmed the fact that trying to fart on purpose for whatever reason doesn’t work. This fact, too, seemed logical. I was not at all proud that I’d become aware of two very useless logical facts in a short time. I’m making this up, actually. From the get-go, I didn’t believe I’d be able to far, so I did not try.

Buy this book!

Both Suah and Deborah will be doing events at this year’s but since those aren’t open to the public, I haven’t listed them below. For any and everyone else, you can see Suah and Deborah in action at these events:

Thursday, October 6th, 7:00 pm

Shadow Ultra Lounge (341 13th St., Oakland, CA 94612)

Friday, October 7th, 7:30 pm
(506 Clement St., San Francisco, CA 94118)

Monday, October 10th, 7:30 pm
(3723 SE Hawthorne Blvd, Portland, OR 97214)

Tuesday, October 11th, 7:00 pm
(1521 10th Ave., Seattle, WA 98122)

Wednesday, October 12th, 7:00 pm
(1474 N. Milwaukee Ave., Chicago, IL 60622)

Thursday, October 13th, 7:00 pm
(2421 Bissonnet Street, Houston, TX 77005)

Friday, October 14th, 7:00 pm
(2010 Flora St., Dallas, TX 75201)

Hopefully you can catch her at one or more of those events!

In May 1980, shortly after the instatement of dictator Chun Doo-hwan after nearly two decades of Park Chung-hee, the Gwangju uprising began—students’ and workers’ protests against Chun Doo-hwan’s restrictive regime. The uprising was brutally suppressed by the police and the military, and the way the dead were treated, allowed to pile up, unclaimed, was particularly horrific.

But this novel does not tell a chronological story of the events of the uprising, in the way that Sunil Yapa’s new novel, Your Heart Is a Muscle the Size of a Fist, follows the first day of the WTO protests in Seattle in 1999. Both have a cast of characters with different perspectives on the event, but it’s significant that Yapa’s novel includes police—who are presented as fully human—while Han’s does not.

In the way it reports on the bleak brutality of the police, the army and the government—a brutality that becomes simultaneously both more cruel and more banal as the novel progresses—_Human Acts_ has more in common with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s writings about the gulag and the semi-random, quota-filling prisoner-taking methods of the Soviets. There’s the same inevitability, the same horrifying repetition of treatment of people, each with their own remarkably individual stories.

The novel opens with Dong-ho, a fifteen-year-old schoolboy. He has become caught up in the uprising more or less by accident and has been searching for his missing friend. He ends up helping out in a makeshift morgue in a school gym—the main morgue being full—as he and a group of students attempt to keep the piled up bodies from decaying too fast before they can be claimed and properly buried. He has the opportunity to study wounds, to wonder how such a thing can be happening in his formerly quiet, predictable life of school and home.

The next section is told from the point of view of his missing friend, who, we quickly learn, is dead. The possibilities a dead narrator offers for tweeness and cutesy emotional manipulation make me nervous, but Jeong-dae’s section, which includes his search for his sister who has also been killed, is genuinely heart breaking. His happy memories of when he was alive are interspersed with the brutal reality of the decaying bodies all around him—flesh that he comes to hate. His chapter ends with a terrible revelation that shifts the ground of the novel around the reader.

Then we move ahead to 1985, to Kim Eun-sook, who has been beaten up because of her publisher’s involvement in publishing a dissident, and then to a prisoner who recalls both the torture and starvation experienced in prison as well as the events of the uprising, remembered very differently from the official accounts used to justify the heavy-handed response.

Characters from one story appear in others, and we return to learn what happened to the students who worked alongside Dong-ho caring for the dead bodies. Nobody is able to forget this traumatic event; it has scarred them for the rest of their lives, which they frequently end themselves as a direct result of their suffering.

The final section, from 2013, is an epilogue written from the author’s perspective and explaining her personal motivation for writing this particular book. Nine years old at the time of the uprising, Han gradually learns that one of her father’s students—a boy who had moved into their old house when they moved away from Gwangju—was killed. As an adult Han devotes a great deal of time to researching the events and interviewing people involved. As her research progresses, she finds it increasingly difficult to take part in normal life and socialize with other people.

Human Acts is a disturbing and upsetting book, but the way its characters react to the official brutality reminds readers that people are capable of committing barbaric acts anywhere, any time, even when civilization seems secure. Like Sumia Sukkar’s underappreciated The Boy From Aleppo Who Painted the War, Human Acts is a book that does not permit a complacent, that-could-never-happen-here attitude; readers are not simply allowed to smugly edutain themselves with a literary form of atrocity tourism. Instead, the focus is on people, on the human body itself, and on trying to make some kind of sense out of the senseless.

Here’s the beginning of the review:

Last year, Han Kang’s The Vegetarian was an unexpected critical hit. Now, it’s just been published in the U.S. and has already received a great deal of positive critical attention. The Vegetarian was a bold book to attempt as an author’s first translation into English, yet Han’s surreal story and the skillful politicization of the characters and events, combined with 2015 BTBA poetry judge Deborah Smith’s excellently smooth and poetic translation, meant that the gamble paid off. Human Acts, Han’s second novel to appear in English, is a very different book in terms of content, yet equally composed and controlled.

In May 1980, shortly after the instatement of dictator Chun Doo-hwan after nearly two decades of Park Chung-hee, the Gwangju uprising began—students’ and workers’ protests against Chun Doo-hwan’s restrictive regime. The uprising was brutally suppressed by the police and the military, and the way the dead were treated, allowed to pile up, unclaimed, was particularly horrific.

But this novel does not tell a chronological story of the events of the uprising, in the way that Sunil Yapa’s new novel, Your Heart Is a Muscle the Size of a Fist, follows the first day of the WTO protests in Seattle in 1999. Both have a cast of characters with different perspectives on the event, but it’s significant that Yapa’s novel includes police—who are presented as fully human—while Han’s does not.

In the way it reports on the bleak brutality of the police, the army and the government—a brutality that becomes simultaneously both more cruel and more banal as the novel progresses—_Human Acts_ has more in common with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s writings about the gulag and the semi-random, quota-filling prisoner-taking methods of the Soviets. There’s the same inevitability, the same horrifying repetition of treatment of people, each with their own remarkably individual stories.

For the rest of the review, go here.

Korean novelist Park Min-Gyu was obviously inspired by Ravel’s work, but he’s not offering a strict interpretation of it. Unlike the French composer, Park writes about a time he lived in (the mid-1980s), a time when people in his country were beginning to get wealthier (thanks to the housing boom and the stock market), but didn’t know what to do with their new wealth. It was also a time when women, regardless of whether they were beautiful or ugly, were exploited for business purposes. In fact, his novel looks at society’s obsession with beauty by pairing a good-looking narrator with a love interest—the “princess” in this story—who is “extraordinarily ugly.” The result is a haunting (albeit flawed) love story, as well as a commentary about our obsession with money and beauty.

The nameless 19-year-old narrator was not among the wealthy, but he did inherit the good looks of his father, a D-list actor who one day abandoned him and his mother. The narrator gets a job at a department store, where he falls for an ugly co-worker. “What is this?” he writes. “In the same way I’d have sat stunned before the TV, I stood in that office, transfixed by her. I had seen quite a few unattractive girls, but I’d never seen a woman this ugly before. Just as the world’s most beautiful woman, the world’s ugliest woman is no less powerful in completely disarming a man.”

Though, as we later learn, the woman experienced a lot of pain growing up because of her ugliness. Despite being a great student and a hard worker, not many people want to hire her. In fact, an employer refuses to give her a job, even though she receives a recommendation from one of her teachers. Later, when she gets a promotion, she only gets it because the manager figures she’ll never leave her job because she’ll never get married. At other times, co-workers tell her to leave because she’s scaring the customers.

It’s this pain that causes the both of them to be uncertain of each other. However, their friend and co-worker, Yohan, who spends a lot of time observing the foolishness of human beings (especially rich ones) over beer and junk food, gives the narrator advice about love:

When someone’s light is lit, she’ll look beautiful. The stronger the lightbulb, the blurrier the curves of the light and the shape of the bulb. Most women—those women who look so-so or aren’t too attractive—and most men, for that matter, are like dim lightbulbs. Once they’re lit, though, anyone can shine, and that is more beautiful and marvelous than any lightbulb that has lost its light. That’s love. Humans are basically electric cords with a single charge running through them. And when two people meet, they light up each other’s soul.

At first, readers may be surprised that someone who lives alone and who is considered “weird” by one of his co-workers would be able to give this kind of advice, but Yohan ends up taking on a much more significant role. Unfortunately, though, this role convolutes the ending. As a result, the reader cannot help but feel somewhat cheated, since Park uses a device akin to making the whole story seem like a dream, an unnecessary tactic in a novel that would have been better without it.

Another problem with the novel is that, at times, the myriad references to Western pop music overwhelm the story. For example, in the chapter called “Strawberry Fields Forever,” lines from the Beatles’s song weave in and out of the narrative so much that it becomes a distraction. Later on, Park does the same with Roberta Flack’s “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” and Bob Dylan’s “Blowing in the Wind.” Sometimes, though, the references seem to serve no greater purpose other than to remind the reader of when there is a shift in time (e.g., Britney Spears’s “. . . Baby One More Time” during the few scenes that take place during the late 1990s.)

That said, Pavane for a Dead Princess still has a lot going for it. It’s a pleasant read in the vein of Norwegian Wood, Haruki Murakami’s classic love story set during a period of great change. The characters are appealing enough that readers will want to follow them on their journey to adulthood. And like his Japanese counterpart, Park shows that regardless of the dark that surrounds us, true love can shine a light.

Here’s the beginning of Chris’s review:

In 1899, Maurice Ravel wrote “Pavane pour une infante dĂ©funte” (“Pavane for a Dead Princess”) for solo piano (a decade later, he published an orchestral version). The piece wasn’t written for a particular person; Ravel simply wanted to compose a pavane (a slow procession) that a princess would have danced to in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Even though it’s an elegant piece of music, Ravel has claimed that the title is meaningless: According to a story that appeared in the Rocky Mountain News in 1970, he told someone, “I simply liked the sound of those words and I put them there, c’est tout.”

Korean novelist Park Min-Gyu was obviously inspired by Ravel’s work, but he’s not offering a strict interpretation of it. Unlike the French composer, Park writes about a time he lived in (the mid-1980s), a time when people in his country were beginning to get wealthier (thanks to the housing boom and the stock market), but didn’t know what to do with their new wealth. It was also a time when women, regardless of whether they were beautiful or ugly, were exploited for business purposes. In fact, his novel looks at society’s obsession with beauty by pairing a good-looking narrator with a love interest—the “princess” in this story—who is “extraordinarily ugly.” The result is a haunting (albeit flawed) love story, as well as a commentary about our obsession with money and beauty.

For the rest of the review, go here.