Ch’oe Myŏngik
Columbia University Press
2024
304
Paperback
Short Stories
Xmas Gift
Korean writer Ch’oe Myŏngik was a lifelong resident of Pyongyang, a city his short stories masterfully evoke in exquisite modernist prose. His career spanned decades of tumult, from his debut in the 1930s while Korea was under Japanese colonial rule through the Asia-Pacific and Korean Wars and the early years of the Democratic People’s Republic. As Pyongyang transformed from Korea’s second city, peripheral to the Seoul-centered literary scene, into a socialist capital in the late 1940s, Ch’oe briefly ascended to the center of North Korean culture. Despite the vitality and originality of Ch’oe’s writing, Cold War politics and censorship, including South Korea’s anticommunist laws, consigned his work to obscurity. Patterns of the Heart and Other Stories presents a selection of Ch’oe’s short fiction in translation, including later works from hard-to-find North Korean publications. These cinematic, keenly observed tales explore Pyongyang in meticulous detail, depicting the city’s transformations and the conflicts between old and new. They pay close attention to the lives of the disaffected: a drifter confronts a former revolutionary dying of heroin addiction; a sex worker is trafficked across the border aboard a train, amid the indifference of her fellow passengers. Later stories provide a striking glimpse of the Korean War—the occupation of Pyongyang, U.S. fighter jets bombing civilian refugees, guerrilla heroics—from a North Korean perspective. Hidden treasures of world literature, these stories offer new perspectives on Korea’s turbulent twentieth century, across political divides still in place today.
Patterns of the Heart and Other Stories is the first book I have read by a North Korean writer after consuming a number of South Korean texts. It was interesting to read these tales coming from a different perspective. The book's translation incorporates the less good, older Korean romanisation system; however, it is the system still used in North Korea, so from that point of view the choice probably makes sense, even though the result is cumbersome. That aside, this was a fascinating collection of stories, each with something different to offer. As with any such anthology, some of the stories captured my interest more than others, but they were all worthwhile reading. I am giving this book 4 stars. Worth a look if you like short stories and have an interest in 20th century Korean history.
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