A Contrived World

by Jung Young Moon, Jeffrey Karvonen (Translator), Eunji Mah (Translator)

Overview

Set in San Francisco, A Most Contrived World recounts the author’s visit to the mythic Californian city. While the novel is based in this real experience, the narrator’s imaginative reflections cause the narrative to balloon outward into the realms of fiction and fantasy. Each chance encounter provides an opportunity to unfurl a fictional world that simultaneously complements and compromises the real world. In this mirthful anti-novel, the ambiguous fusion of observation and invention disrupts the conventions of personal memoir and travel writing, resulting in a chronicle that sets fiction against experience.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781564789556
Publisher:	Deep Vellum Publishing
Publication date:	06/24/2016
Series:	Library of Korean Literature Series
Pages:	163
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Novelist, short-story writer, translator, playwright, and teacher, Jung Young-Moon was born in Hamyang, South Korea, in 1965. He graduated from Seoul National Universitywith a degree in psychology. He made his literary debut in 1996 when his novel A Man Who Barely Exists. He has also translated more than forty English books into Korean.

Editorial Reviews

"Does Korean literature have a slacker-novel genre? If so, here's its archetype." - Kirkus Reviews

From the Publisher

2016-02-08
Does Korean literature have a slacker-novel genre? If so, here's its archetype. The protagonist of novelist/translator Jung's (Most Ambiguous Sunday and Other Stories, 2013, etc.) slender yarn is a man of thought. Much thought. Too much thought. When he travels from Korea to find his girlfriend living with a Mexican man in Los Angeles, he finds himself pondering the interloper's tattoo, then his rightness for a part in "a dull western movie in which a great many people are shot to death," then his "very large black penis." Never mind the discordant ethnicity, for our narrator is now off to thinking about lying in bed with his erstwhile girlfriend, "holding her nipple in my mouth without sucking on it or thinking about sucking on it." Evidently exhausted by his mental efforts, he takes his time doing much of anything: a week drinking tequila here, a few days of gazing down at a vacant lot from the top of a scrubby hill there. Dostoyevsky's Underground Man is already looking like Jackie Chan compared to this fellow by the time an odd habit of his begins to become painfully evident, namely a bizarre hyperattention to every scrap of data that passes by his eye or through his thoughts, so that Jung (for this is a conscious choice on the writer's part, after all) spends hundreds of words having him wonder whether the catfish he's ordered in Chinatown—at least he's managed to move a few hundred miles north to San Francisco—was raised in Vietnam or the "Mississippi River Valley," wherever that might be. By the time he gets to pondering the local fauna, the reader may be inclined to move a few hundred miles away, too: "Somewhere else in this world there might be a park with more moles, but I could not imagine a park with more moles than Golden Gate Park, which made the park seem to belong to the moles." A contrived world? A contrived book, though, if such a thing is wanted, an inducement to torpor and despair.

Kirkus Reviews