Jung Young Moon (born 1965) is a South Korean writer and translator.
1. Life
Jung Young Moon was born in Hamyang, South Gyeongsang Province. He graduated from Seoul National University with a degree in psychology.
Jung made his literary debut in 1996 publishing the novel Gyeou jonjaehaneun ingan (겨우 존재하는 인간 A Man Who Barely Exists) in Jakga Segye. His short story collections and novels include Geomeun iyagi saseul (검은 이야기 사슬 A Chain of Dark Tales), for which he won the Dongseo Literary Award; Pitgi eomneun dokbaek (핏기 없는 독백 Pale Soliloquy), Hapum (하품 Yawn), Moksinui eotteon ohu (목신의 어떤 오후 Afternoon with a Faun), Basellin butda (바셀린 붓다 Vaseline Buddha), Eotteon jagwiui segye (어떤 작위의 세계 A Contrived World), Orimujunge ireuda (오리무중에 이르다 Arriving in a Thick Fog), and Gangmul e tteonaeryeoganeun 7 in ui samurai (강물에 떠내려가는 7인의 사무라이 Seven Samurai Swept Away in a River). His play Dangnagwideul (당나귀들 The Donkeys) was produced by the National Theater of Korea in 2003.
In 2005, Jung was invited to participate in the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program, and in 2010 he was invited by the University of California at Berkeley’s Center for Korea Study to participate in a three-month-long residency program. Jung is also an accomplished translator who has translated more than forty books from English into Korean, including John Fowles' Ebony Tower, Raymond Carver’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, Lee Chang-Rae’s Aloft, Nicholson Baker’s Fermata, and Germaine Greer’s The Boy.
2. Writing
Jung’s debut work, Gyeou jonjaehaneun ingan, portrays a man mired in ennui, in which state he contemplates the meaning of life. His first collection, A Chain of Dark Tales, showcases Kafkaesque short stories which delve into the question of what being means, and what the loss of being means.
Jung’s stories share the common denominator of either addressing the grotesque or speaking to the problem of cruel devilishness. Many of his characters are unable to endure the ennui of life, expressing their weariness in dark and disturbing ways. One critic even stated that the characters in Jung’s stories are like zombies. Nevertheless, he does not fail to include humor. But that laughter is rooted in a despondent scorn towards the world, as well as a sense of emptiness at the absurdity of society.
The four novellas in Arriving in a Thick Fog typify Jung's emphasis not on events, but on the meticulous and convoluted paths the narrator's minds take as they navigate through life. Through a deep, filterless gaze into the narrator's heads, Jung shares thorough musings that manage to be both spontaneous and complex. Like "a person looking for a path that stretches forever in the wrong direction," the reader traces the steps of one who is walking endlessly toward a false destination, through a maze of layered stories. [1]
Jung's most recent work, Seven Samurai Swept Away in a River, recounts the time he spent at an artist’s and writers residency in small-town Texas. In an attempt to understand what a “true Texan should know,” the author reflects on his outsider experiences in this most unique of places, learning to two-step, musing on cowboy hats and cowboy churches, blending his observations with a meditative rumination on the history of Texas and the events that shaped the state, from the first settlers to Jack Ruby and Lee Harvey Oswald. All the while, the author is asking what a novel is and must be, while accompanied by a fictional cast of seven samurai who the author invents and carries with him, silent companions in a pantomime of existential theater. In his inimitable, recursive, meditative style that reads like a comedic zen koan but contains universes, Jung blends fact with imagination, humor with reflection, and meaning with meaninglessness, as his meanderings become an absorbing, engaging, quintessential novel of ideas. [2]
Reference
[1] https://www.abe.pl/en/book/9781646050437/arriving-in-a-thick-fog
[2] https://www.amazon.com/Seven-Samurai-Swept-Away-River/dp/1941920853
