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Another Man's City: A Novel (Library of Korean Literature), by In-Ho Choi
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"Another Man's City "is structured as a virtual-reality narrative manipulated by an entity referred to variously as the Invisible Hand or Big Brother. The scenario is reminiscent of Peter Weir's 1998 film "The Truman Show" and Kazuo Ishiguro's novel "The Unconsoled." The novel begins with a series of seemingly minor juxtapositions of the familiar and the strange, as a result of which the protagonist, K, gradually finds himself inside a Matrix-like reality populated with shape-shifting characters.
- Sales Rank: #1978666 in Books
- Published on: 2014-10-14
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.80" h x .50" w x 5.70" l, .0 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 190 pages
Review
This novel is a symbolic protest against the arrogantly mundane approach of the strain of realism that, cloaked in the guise of humanism, has dominated modern Korean fiction. Choi challenges us to consider new possibilities for literature in an age when the divine is largely absent from literary art.
(Professor Kwon Youngmin Munhak sasang)
This lightly Kafkaesque fable from a South Korean writer presents a man who suddenly finds his world not quite right in increasingly strange ways... There is a lot of charm to [Ch'oe's] anxious novel, as if Thurber and Orwell had gotten together for a skull session.
(Kirkus Review)
An intriguing examination of contemporary life and identity -- the roles we play and the ones forced on us -- that allows for myriad interpretations.
(Complete Review)
About the Author
Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton are the translators of numerous volumes of contemporary Korean fiction, including Trees on a Slope by Hwang Sun-wōn and The Dwarf by Cho Se-hui, both published by University of Hawai'i Press. Bruce Fulton is the inaugural holder of the Young-Bin Min Chair in Korean Literature and Literary Translation in the Department of Asian Studies, University of British Columbia.
Ju-Chan Fulton is, with Bruce Fulton, the cotranslator of The Dwarf by Cho Se-hui and Trees on a Slope by Hwang Sun-won.
Most helpful customer reviews
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
A very accessible, very serious book
By John Armstrong
The protagonist-narrator, who we know only as K, is awakened by his alarm clock Saturday morning and notices (starting with the clock itself, which shouldn't have gone off on a weekend day), that things aren't quite right. He remembers that he was out after work last night but can't remember what he did, and he also remembers that after he came home and joined his wife in their weekly "party" things did not go their usual enjoyable and satisfying way. He discovers that he has lost his cellphone, and decides to call it in the hope that someone has it and will pick up and talk to him. He lets it ring a number of times and gets no answer. But a minute later he gets a call from a number he recognizes as his own. The man on the phone seems friendly enough, and he arranges to meet him and get his phone back.
So the adventure begins. K's goal is to find out what happened on Friday night, where he went, who he was with, what he did, with the hope that once he does his life will get back to normal. In the course of the weekend he has significant encounters with a number of people, some of whom he knows, or knew, and some who are new to him. They include:
- H, K's therapist friend who spends equal time advising K and complaining bitterly about his own gold-digging secretary mistress and his cheating wife,
- P, K's sister's ex-husband, who lives a double life as a university professor and a glamorous crossdresser,
- K's sister KS, who was once a successful actress and now lives a sad and lonely life devoted mostly to eating,
- Sailor Moon, that is, a barely legal prostitute who cosplays Sailor Moon in a sex parlor catering to men who want to grope schoolgirls, and finally
- Rocket, a petty gangster, pimp, and failed husband and father who has no illusions about his sorry existence.
As K travels around Seoul going from clue to clue and encounter to encounter he becomes more and more aware of the presence of "familiar" people, that is, people who logically have to be completely different and yet are unmistakably the same. These include a youngish man who seems to be facilitating him in various ways (for example driving him home when he's had too much to drink), an older man who tends to appear as one family in-law or another (for example his sister's second husband), and a mysterious woman who, in her various guises, seems always to be sexually taunting him.
In time his sense of something being not right gives way to a full-out paranoid belief that these "familiar" people who recur in different roles are agents in service of an unseen power that is controlling his life and everything he does. (Note that the original Korean title of the book is Nannigeun taindeului toshi which translates to City of Familiar Strangers.) His feeling toward this unseen power is complex but basically accepting, and his mission becomes, not to defeat it, escape it or even understand it, but simply to go where it is taking him and see what happens on the way.
The easy writing style and genre-fiction plot make for a very accessible book. But this does not mean that the book is not serious. The author, Ch'oe In-ho (alternatively Romanized Choi In-Ho), was extremely popular in Korea and had great "reach". He was also dying of cancer as we wrote this book. He knew it was going to be his last book and, as he said himself, he wanted it to be the book he was remembered by. So, what did he want to do with it?
Ch'oe was a life-long Catholic and religion was important to him. It is only natural that, as he faced his own death, he would examine his faith and come to terms with it one way or another. This is really what the book is about. One long scene towards the end of the book, the scene in the church, is most of all about this, but at some level the whole book is about it. You don't have to be a Catholic or even religious to get what he is saying, you just have to have a basic openness to the universal question of the meaning of life (and of death).
It is not coincidental that sex plays a very big part in the book. Really, just about everything that happens from the beginning to the end involves sex in one way or another. It is not gratuitous, it is not graphic, it is not salacious. But it is there. In many flavors, ranging from the most wholesome imaginable (a man who loves to make love to his wife and has zero desire to have sex with anyone else) to the most taboo (incest) with many steps in between.
But sex in this book is not just sex, it is an act which, whatever exact form it takes, is infused with meaning that goes beyond the act itself. The archetype for K, good Catholic that he is, is Adam and Eve. Their story is rich in meaning, but for K the central idea is that of the Tree of Good and Evil. Adam and Eve ate the fruit of this tree, which was forbidden to them (this act is universally taken to be sexual intercourse), and in so doing committed the first sin. They lost eternal life but gained the freedom to do both good and evil, and this freedom has been passed on to every human being. For K this means that there are two parts to every person, the part that does good and the part that does evil. When the two parts become alienated from each other the person effectively splits in half. And yet the parts yearn to be reunited, and performing the act of eating the fruit (i.e. sex) allows them to experience, at least for a moment, their original pre-split state. It is really a kind of sacrament - it has been called the Hieros Gammos or Sacred Marriage - and K clearly feels it as such.
One last thing. In Another Man's City is cast in the form of popular genre fiction (a kind of sci-fi/fantasy), and readers tend to connect the book with other works in the same category or a related one. The blurb on the back of the Dalkey Archive Press edition mentions, among others, Orwell, the Matrix, and the Truman Show. All these works share the idea that people's lives are controlled by some external force, whether it's Big Brother (or rather the pols behind Big Brother) in 1984 or the TV network in Truman or the machines in Matrix. But these connections, obvious as they seem, ignore the question of why the control is happening and to what end (if any). Big Brother's control is for political totalitarianism. The Matrix's control is for economic exploitation. The Truman Show's is for entertainment of an audience. What is purpose or goal of the external control that K feels?
The author answers this question and he answers it within a framework of religion, and particularly Catholicism. But although Catholicism was unquestionably his "primary" religion, it is not the only religion which had meaning for him. The other is Buddhism, and I could not help but feel that it too was present in the book, if only in a latent way. My own reading of the book, for what it is worth, is that K's Matrix is at heart the shimmering illusion of the Floating World, that which controls him is the endless turning of the Wheel of Life, and the final goal is Nirvana.
For me Ch'oe In-ho's last book was a very enjoyable read and a deeply moving one. I know that not everyone will have the same experience, but still I give it a full 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
A Little Confusion Goes a Long Way
By Tony's Reading List
Ch’oe Inho’s Another Man’s City (translated by Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton) is an intriguing story set over the course of a weekend. Businessman K is rudely woken by his alarm clock at seven o’clock in the morning, dutifully crawling out of bed. That’s not unusual in itself, except for the fact that it’s Saturday – so why was it set? As the morning progresses, he notices a few other odd details and begins to wonder what’s going on:
“K lifted the toilet seat and sat. Not for the usual reason, but because he needed to make sense of what was going on. Something was messed up. It had started at seven, when the alarm came on. It had come on by itself – nobody had set it. And then, for the first time in his fifteen years of married life, he had risen from his bed naked, his bedclothes having vanished like a magician’s dove. And finally his aftershave had disappeared, replaced with a brand he wouldn’t be caught dead with.”
p.16 (Dalkey Archive Press)
After a strange encounter with a wife who no longer behaves like the one he’s lived with for years, K’s confusion grows…
Over the course of the weekend, K attempts to work out why his life seems subtly different. The key appears to be a missing ninety-minute section of his memory during his Friday-night drinking, a period in which he did a lot of things which are out of character. Pursuing every trail he can find, he slowly realises that his life is not what he thought it was. What if he’s not really in control of his life – what if it’s all just a game?
Quite apart from the name of the main character, Another Man’s City contains obvious references to Kafka (especially The Trial and The Castle), and the early parts reflect this, with K charging around the city trying to get to the bottom of the mystery. Later, the story becomes (even) more surreal, though, and the reader must pay close attention to the clues Ch’oe spreads throughout the text. The whole affair turns into an existential puzzle as K begins to wonder whether the world around him has shifted, or whether it’s actually he who has changed.
It’s certainly a page turner, the writer dragging us around Seoul in K’s wake, taking us places we’ve never been before (and some we’d much rather not have ventured into). The key to the story is working out what actually happened on the Friday night, and after catching up with a friend, the man he was drinking with before the blackout, the hunt is on. As K attempts to retrace his steps, we see there’s more to life in the big city than office buildings and late night drinking sessions. As much as an external trip, it’s really a journey into K’s psyche – and there are some disturbing things in there, let me tell you.
One way of seeing the novel is as an examination of modern life, an amusing picture of modern-day Seoul. The anonymity of the big city means that there are types not people, which might explain why K sees the same faces over and over again. This extends to the names the writer gives his characters – K, H, P… One of the few more individual names, Olenka, belongs to a professor who spends his weekends getting in touch with his feminine side (not a character I’ve found in Kafka…).
Another major theme here is a fear of the all-seeing power of the state. As K becomes aware of the changes around him, he begins to sense the hand of a higher agency, one he’s quick to label ‘Big Brother’. From the Kafkaesque, then, we move to the Orwellian, a sense that every move we make is predictable, preordained and observed:
“Hadn’t K become a human train, an automaton, coming and going as programmed? If he wanted to try a different kind of coffee, wouldn’t that thought too have been programmed by Big Brother? And even if he were to select orange juice instead of coffee in an attempt to circumvent Big Brother’s control, wouldn’t such a niggling deviation also be consistent with Big Brother’s plan?” (p.127)
Still, it’s not quite that simple – this is not a cheap knock-off of modern western classics…
This novel was completed shortly before Choe’s death in 2013, forty years after the appearance of the short story ‘Another Man’s Room’ (included in the Modern Korean Fiction anthology). In this story, a man comes home from a business trip to find his wife absent, and has strange experiences in an apartment which seems to have altered in imperceptible ways. Another Man’s City, quite apart from the title, has a lot in common with the earlier piece, seeming almost to be an expansion of that brief story, one taking it to another level; perhaps it’s a theme Ch’oe was determined to tackle again before his writing days were done.
Another Man’s City is a clever novel, one for those who enjoy books where nothing can be taken for granted, and where everything is slightly off-kilter. While learning about Korean culture and traditions can be interesting, it’s good to read something a little different now and then, and this one makes a nice change from some of the more traditional, culturally laden novels. I can think of worse ways to spend your weekend than a quick trip around Seoul in K’s company ;)
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