A feast of Kim Hoon's prose, born where the body, mind, and scenery meet and diverge!

Bicycle Journeys, which could be called the quintessence of Kim’s essays, has been republished.

Kim once said, “I like sentences that neatly lay out only the facts.” Likewise, his language always strives to stay close to the facts. It revises the postpositions for sentences like "The flower has bloomed" and aims to distance itself from the world of opinions and emotions while objectively stating physical facts without any flamboyant rhetoric, which makes it infinitely beautiful. While his texts strictly speak of the road and the landscape, they vividly reflect our lives more than any other writings.

In his sentences, the road, the landscape, and the scenes of our life aren’t set apart; they meet, split, and entangle into one before becoming something unique.

He once said, “I’m not clever enough to use logic to deny what my body proves.” Perhaps what makes his prose exquisite is that it was written with his body, not his thoughts.

In his texts, he talks about how to choose squid, flatfish, and how to collect the right salt. He tells the story of the humble lives of children in Deokchi Village along the Seomjin River, whom the poet Kim Yong-taek teaches.

He states things exactly as they are, without a single judgment or appreciation, then adds his own words.

When he speaks of roads, the scenery, and the seasons, our life is fully contained within them. It’s not a metaphor or comparison—the sentences themselves embody our life. The scenery and our life within it correspond one-to-one.

As the humanities scholar Park Woong-hyun said, "It overflows with new sentences that shake your heart and are worth underlining over and over." Moreover, you can see how the writer's sentences resonate differently each time you open the book.

Support from Munhakdongne Publishing Group