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Miseries Turn into Memories: Unknown Women by Shin Kyung-sook scrap
by Cho Yeon-jung
October 23, 2014
Author Bio 작가 소개
Shin Kyung-sook
Unknown Women is a collection of short stories written over the past eight years by novelist Shin Kyung-sook. This book contains seven stories that the author says she wrote “whenever she felt her heart was broken or shattered.” Perhaps this explains the characters in this collection who feel lonely and hurt because of broken relationships or their own miseries. The author brings her quiet, heartwarming compassion to the pages as if offering them comfort. Shin’s works in the past have expressed the details of everyday emotions in a beautiful style and have often comforted to readers who are weary of life. This collection is not an exception.
“Shoes at the Edge of the World” elegantly weaves a story of many characters centering around shoes as the motif. Shin uses bare feet and shoes to express the meaning of life, from the shoes of friendship worth dying for to the shoes symbolizing the yearning for a neighborhood friend, and the beautiful toe shoes for the deformed feet of a ballerina.
In addition to shoes, another noticeable motif in this story collection might be food. In “A Yard with Plant Pots,” the narrator is left too shell-shocked to eat or speak when her boyfriend suddenly announces that he is leaving her. But she gradually begins to confide her secrets over a meal to a woman she does not know. Similarly, in “Unknown Women,” the relationship between two women who used to write each other about everyday things in a shared notebook gradually develops to the point where they share their painful secrets exclusively with each other. Most of the entries in their notebook are about food.
About mistakes that anyone can make and miseries that can befall anyone, Shin’s book seems to be saying that there comes a time when one can say “I felt like I could feel memories instead of miseries.” The author is telling readers that just as the shoes we put on every day protect us, and the food we eat every day comforts us, we may be giving each other what the other needs and appreciates deeply, without even realizing it. 
Writer 필자 소개
Cho Yeon-jung
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