The Reverse Side of Life by Lee Seung-U

Really enjoyed this novel by Lee Seung-U, I bought this novel because I read his short story Magnolia Park almost two years ago and thought it was amazing.

This novel is supposedly semi-autobiographical, and Lee takes an interesting formal approach to the material of his life. The novel takes the form of a book written by a journalist who is tasked to write a critical book on Korean writer Bak Bugil, exploring the intersections between his life and his oeuvre. Bak is a reluctant recipient of this honour, so the journalist-I narrator writes the book through interviews with Bak, his various works, and his own conjectures, constructing a work of multiple perspectives from various layers and various depths of subjective/objective analysis.

"The past is completely based on memory, and all memories have been censored and carefully selected. Time is unflinching, and my ego is huge, a small universe surrounded by so many layers. Every layer has its own truth, which is only true in that layer. Is there no truth that can penetrate through all the layers like a harpoon? ..." (p. 78 - 79).

"Of course, I'm not such a hare-brain that I can't distinguish between a novel and a memoir or an autobiography... Readers, however, are naturally intrigued when they find passages in a work of fiction which match real life. Writers obviously do not record their lives exactly..." (p. 130) -- is Lee warning us, the readers not to misread this work as a confession?

Interesting note about my copy: inside the front cover, there is note from the translator to recently deceased East-Asian scholar Nancy Abelmann. I guess I have her personal copy.

Unfortunately, I found the translation a bit lacking at parts:

"That's how foolish things happen. Common sense means staying on track and thereby staying safe. Once one strays from the path, nothing guarantees one's safety. Thereafter, the abnormal becomes common sense. Paranoid thoughts blaze paranoid paths..." While I have limited exposure to written Korean in literature, I have the sense that there is a preference for short and precise sentences. I thought more transliteration was necessary for these types of paragraphs, however, they sound too tedious and platitudinous.

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