So many short story collections these days get described as “genre-defying” and “surreal”, and honestly, it doesn’t make me want to read them, but this one was long-listed for the Booker International Prize, which I’m generally more interested in (and this year’s list was especially good), and then I learned that the author translates Russian and Polish literature into Korean and I promptly ordered myself as copy from Blackwell’s (did you know they ship to the US for free?!). I would love to know which authors she translates, because I definitely felt like there was a flavor of Polish modernist absurdism (but I was of course preconditioned to see it there), albeit turned to dazzlingly creative new ends.
These stories are so wonderfully strange and surprising. Fairy-tale-like, with actual princesses and mythical creatures, sometimes, but also wonderfully not — there’s a delightful matter-of-factness to the tone, such that there’s a sense of magic that has absolutely nothing twee about it (credit to Anton Hur for a brilliant, sparkling translation!). They are sometimes eerie and unsettling, but the horror is tempered with longing and melancholy, and never seems pointlessly brutal or sensationalistic. I guess the best way to put it is to say that these stories are magic, in the most complex and layered sense of the word. A really remarkable collection.
Kasia Reads 