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Korean Literature Now

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In Search of Time Lost: Minimal Love by Jon Kyongnin scrap

by Park Hyekyunggo link October 26, 2014

Author Bio 작가 소개

전경린

Jon Kyongnin

“In my dreams, someone was always spinning lies the way a spider spins its web and whispering them into my ear—so many lies that they overflowed.” (Yeomsoreul moneun yeoja (염소를 모는 여자 A Woman Driving a Goat), Munhakdongne, 2014)

Jon Kyongnin is a writer known for her nuanced yet powerful portrayals of concealed or repressed female sexuality.

368pp.

Jon Kyongnin has continually depicted the abyss of love and desire between two people, and showed how this kind of relationship leaves an irrevocable scar. Her new book, Minimal Love, is written in her typically sensuous language and also delves into the pain lurking inside people’s interior lives.

After Hui-su’s mother dies and her father remarries a woman who brought her own daughter along, Hui-su, the protagonist of the novel, is haunted by a past in which she and her brother abandoned their stepsister, Yu-ran. The unfounded fear—that the seven-year-old stepsister that their stepmother brought into the family would monopolize all the love—led Hui-su to commit a terrible deed which turns into an indelible trauma, haunting her for the rest of her life. This incident becomes like a black hole that sucks all the vital energy and willpower out of her life. Little did Hui-su know that when she abandoned Yu-ran she also relinquished her own sense of self.

Until her stepmother pleads with her on her deathbed for Hui-su to look for Yu-ran, Hui-su had been going through the motions of life, going to school, getting married, and finding a job. Finally in search of Yu-ran, Hui-su sets out for a barren land where it is brutally cold; there, she finds herself in an empty room where Yu-ran used to live. Hui-su discovers how Yu-ran suffered from a unique malady of spasms of pain and excruciating headaches whenever she desired something; and upon finding this out Hui-su is inflicted with a terrible ache.

This experience is an unavoidable fate that Hui-su has to confront in order to reclaim the life that she had lost because of Yu-ran. When spring arrives, Hui-su receives a trunk that belonged to Yu-ran that has finally found its way home. Her lost life has at last been found. 

Writer 필자 소개

Park Hyekyung

Park Hyekyung

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