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Lord of the Schoolboys
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16911 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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4 / 1990 |
1,384 Words |
| Author
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Bruce Fulton
Bruce Fulton is a translator of Korean literature and a former
Peace Corps volunteer in Korea. |
OUR TWISTED HERO
Yi Munyol, trans. Kevin O'Rourke.
Seoul: Minum Publishing Co. (44-1 Kwanchol-dong, Chongno-gu, Seoul 110-111, Korea), 1988
119 pp., $5.25
Yi Munyol is that rare author - a prolific writer whose works of fiction are bestsellers yet enjoy critical acclaim. In Korea he is widely regarded as a writer of great intellectual power. Barely forty years old, he has already won two of the most prestigious Korean literary awards - the Yi Sang Prize (for the work reviewed here) and the Tongin Prize – one of only a handful of authors to have received both honors. Yi's novels, such as Hail to the Emperor, strike some readers as turgid and didactic, but shorter works such as "The Winter That Was" and the novella Our Twisted Hero show his storytelling talents to good effect.
Readers of contemporary Korean literature in translation owe a debt to Kevin O'Rourke for having temporarily forsaken his first love - Korean poetry - to set his hand once again to a work of fiction. Father O'Rourke has lived in Korea since 1964, holds a doctorate in Korean literature, and h as published a number of translations of Korean poetry and prose. His prose translations are ever fluent and reflect a deep knowledge of Korean culture and an understanding of the myriad subtleties of the Korean language.
Our Twisted is a parable of the corruption potential of power, set in the 1950s in a rural elementary school. The narrator, Pyongt'ae, is a fifth grader recently arrived from Seoul who finds that his new
... (1993 of 8022 Characters)
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