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A Most Ambiguous Sunday and Other Stories
Considered an eccentric in the traditional Korean literary world, Jung Young-moon s short stories have nonetheless won numerous readers both in Korea and abroad, most often drawing comparisons to Kafka. Adopting strange, warped, unstable characters and drawing heavily on the literature of the absurd, Jung's stories nonetheless do not wallow in darkness, despair, or negativity. Instead, we find a world in which the bizarre and terrifying are often put to comic use, even in direst of situations, and point toward a sort of redemption to be found precisely in the weirdest and most unsettling parts of life . . .
294 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2008
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Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews
June 28, 2022
’The horse looked rather artificial, as if it was aware of the camera and was posing. This horse looked like it was filled with resolve, yet it also appeared to be in a state of self-abandonment, enduring great difficulties. Depending on the feelings of each viewer, the horse evoked different motions. It seemed to have emerged from the white backdrop, but it also seemed as if it would disappear into the backdrop. I ultimately imagined the horse disappearing into the white background.’
More of a 4 than a 5, BUT really too many lines scattered here and there in the book were too impressive to not give this a 5. It’s one of those lines where it makes you think that no other writers could have come up with this. It’s just so uniquely Jung. If I felt inclined to give it a 4, it is only because I have not learned to appreciate some of his more obscure/experimental chunks. I found the stories with too many ‘animals’ in it a bit cryptic in meaning and made me a bit dizzy. Not sure which is my favourite yet as I’ve just finished reading the book, but I keep thinking about the one about a half-arsed burglary(?)/house invasion attempt. It’s fucked up and/but beautiful; and in my opinion, it’s surely some kind of a masterpiece.
‘She realized that learning that someone has hemorrhoids can make you feel closer to them. It was different from finding out that someone has a heart problem or diabetes or high blood pressure. In fact, you have to be very close to someone in order to confess that you have hemorrhoids.’
The above is from the story I think I like best in the collection. Even though it’s definitely not a ‘light’ story, I’d argue it’s probably the ‘lightest’ one in the collection. One that I can actually laugh freely without being pinched by the thoughts of like ‘is it fucked up that I’m laughing about this?’ as with some of Jung’s other stories. Also, reading the above made me laugh because (I like to think) that I became so close so quickly to one of my dearest friends very early on in our friendship because of her haemorrhoidectomy. It’s hard not to become close to someone when most of the conversations you have with them in the beginning of your friendship with them ends/starts with a detailed discussion of their bum.
‘Molly talked to herself from time to time. My girlfriend, in a good mood after returning from church on Sundays, would sing a song from church, and stare at Molly and say, What do you think, tell me what you think, show me that you think, too, and Molly would think for a moment and say, Crazy bitch. When she did, my girlfriend would be very happy and pat Molly on the head. My girlfriend went to church only on Sundays, and did cross-stitching when she had some free time. I kept two goldfish in a small fishbowl by the window.’
The story about the ‘tragedy’ of a couple of pet parrots is one of my favourites in the collection. I can’t get over the ‘scene’ that only lasted for a brief paragraph. How does Jung manage it? It’s like plucking the reader’s emotions like feathers of a live bird. ‘Molly’ mentioned above is one of the parrots. Jung write with such incredible intimacy about ‘nature’ – be it the weather, plants, or animals. His descriptions of them are so intensely alive, so vivid and surreal. He almost reminds me of Clarice Lispector (and she’s one of my favourite writers of all time). Or am I saying that because of how he writes about the elderly without discounting their ‘humanity’, and instead make them as real as can be – to the extent that it’s uncomfortable to read (as he brings light to their inner thoughts that would otherwise be kept unsaid for propriety’s sake). It makes the characterisation all so real, too real, it seems surreal. The following texts below are from a story in which the protagonist, an elderly man in a wheelchair recording himself with a camcorder while mindlessly indulging in countless amount of melon flavoured sweets.
‘As you might know, your mother and I didn’t love each other. Well, maybe we loved each other in the most exhausted sense of love. Yes, it was a strange relationship. Anyhow, we accidentally got to know each other and kept on seeing one another, like a habit you can’t easily abandon. While together we would treat each other in a causal and disrespectful way . . . although no serious ill-treatment occurred at all between us, I couldn’t help feeling insulted.’
‘Have I ever truly loved anyone or anything?” He shakes his head. “I was always ready not to love anyone or anything. Love was something beyond my capacity. So I’ve tried not to love anything, even a trivial thing. I thought loving somebody was the most horrible thing I could do to myself. And now I can allow myself to admit that I don’t have the ability to truly love someone, and I’m also now able to recognize the fact.’
Aside from all those compliments I have for the writer, Jung, another thing that made me really excited was the translators of the text. I’m so surprised that Jung was also involved in translating the text – in a collaborative way with one or two of them for some of his stories. I have no complaints about the translation at all, but I also don’t know if I can see a difference and/or prefer such an intimate form of literary translation. I would think that it would be more difficult to translate in this way, but this is not something I have any kind of experience in so I wouldn’t know.
‘Her lips were tasteless. And the kiss was neither good nor bad. It was such an empty experience that I wondered how it was possible for me to feel that way. And it seemed she felt the same way, too. With our lips touching we looked at each other from such a close distance that the other person’s face appeared blurry. And while we were kissing we didn’t experience anything like eternity passing. The kiss, where no tongues were extended and no excitement was shared, was so dispassionate that it didn’t provoke or reject any reaction—it was a kiss of cessation. I felt like I was kissing the trace of a kiss. I felt her shallow breathing on the tip of my nose. We realized that we couldn’t get any closer to each other, couldn’t go beyond the border created by our lips and that if we did so it would go against our deepest wishes.’
Every time I thought I’ve familiarised myself with Jung’s literary ‘patterns’ (especially) of how he makes his readers uncomfortable, I’m yet again shocked by a new paragraph that boils my bile. But it’s all so brilliantly composed that I almost don’t mind how gross it is?
The titular story did not impress/move me much, but I would love to hear/read the thoughts of someone who has a different experience to mine. Still, it still feels like it definitely deserves a spot in the collection. Something about the church and the dumpling feast being so incongruously set is mildly ‘disturbing’ in its own ways. Jung’s work/writing feels as close as ‘visual art’ can get in a ‘literary’ form (if that even makes any sense; I’m sure there are better ways to phrase this, but this is quick, half-arsed execution is all I’ve got at the moment).
‘Afterwards she came out with her face washed and then started putting on some makeup, acting as if she was all alone in the room. In the mirror he watched the woman apply her makeup. As she put on her face powder, her complexion became paler and her wrinkles disappeared. “You look like you’ve put on some weight,” he said. “Aging, no doubt,” she replied. In the mirror the woman was only looking at herself. Meanwhile, he stared at himself watching the woman in the mirror. He stared like he was trying to figure out who was who in an old photo. The woman now looked at him in the mirror. She looked like a stranger to him. The two sat there without saying anything. All the while, the woman kept yawning.’
‘At rare times, the music exerted a power over me, but usually I found music very dreary and nearly intolerable. It had gotten to the point where I could only tolerate music at rare moments. Though she also played the piano, there was little music that she could tolerate, and she believed that something about peoples’ absolute faith in music and its ability to touch the soul was excessive. She believed that, like religion, there were too many superstitions surrounding music. We both shared a certain hostility toward music.’
If I have to compare Jung to other writers I’ve read, I’d say he’s kind of like Miranda July, Tao Lin, and Hiromi Kawakami altogether. May I also add Lydia Davis and Ottessa Moshfegh? Perhaps even a bit of Bora Chung without the Chung-esque horror. I adore the playful tone in Jung’s writing that is always present regardless of what kind of plot/themes he’s using to cook up a story with. There’s a clear presence of something of the absurd in his stories which I’m so obsessed with – they has a strangely Camus-esque air to them as well.
‘Maybe K was asleep. He had severe insomnia, and sometimes, he would go without sleep for several days, then sleep for two days in a row. Perhaps what had brought the three of them together was their severe insomnia. In any case, many of the significant memories they had in common had to do with sleep.’
November 15, 2020
I've often read story collections of authors before their novels, but in the case of Young-moon, I believe this is less accessible than his longer works, and is the 4th thing of his I've read. The best way I can think to characterize his style is: abstract, pseudo-omniscient, first-person Impressionism.
The stories revolve around a bizarre occurrence, involve a small number of characters, little dialogue, a lot of summary. Not much happens, but a lot of random-seeming observations take place. Our narrator rarely alters his detached standpoint, but his wandering mind provides a panorama of events, tidbits, details, and speculations. It is tough to pin down what is appealing about the writing, or if it is skillful or not. There is little philosophical about it. The author has been compared to Beckett, but I am inclined to lump him into the category of Kmart realism - which is a wildly inappropriate school of thought considering his background, but the feelings he evokes seem to be an accrual of non-symbols juxtaposed with free associations. He does not justify anything, just puts it on the page. You have no idea where he will go next. In this way, surprises abound. It is easy to trace Young-moon's train of thought as he jumps from one subject to the next, and the reader can appreciate this intimate understanding with the author, that we are sharing this connective assimilation of information. Since his method is singular, humble, and straightforward in its weirdness, he can claim to be uniquely valuable, though how full or rich or deep his experimentation becomes as a work of art, consumable and ephemeral in the experience of absorbing its content, may be wholly up to the reader.
His other titles may offer more memorable distractions, and may display a more focused discipline, but these tales are unpredictable, dreamlike and peculiarly alive.
The stories revolve around a bizarre occurrence, involve a small number of characters, little dialogue, a lot of summary. Not much happens, but a lot of random-seeming observations take place. Our narrator rarely alters his detached standpoint, but his wandering mind provides a panorama of events, tidbits, details, and speculations. It is tough to pin down what is appealing about the writing, or if it is skillful or not. There is little philosophical about it. The author has been compared to Beckett, but I am inclined to lump him into the category of Kmart realism - which is a wildly inappropriate school of thought considering his background, but the feelings he evokes seem to be an accrual of non-symbols juxtaposed with free associations. He does not justify anything, just puts it on the page. You have no idea where he will go next. In this way, surprises abound. It is easy to trace Young-moon's train of thought as he jumps from one subject to the next, and the reader can appreciate this intimate understanding with the author, that we are sharing this connective assimilation of information. Since his method is singular, humble, and straightforward in its weirdness, he can claim to be uniquely valuable, though how full or rich or deep his experimentation becomes as a work of art, consumable and ephemeral in the experience of absorbing its content, may be wholly up to the reader.
His other titles may offer more memorable distractions, and may display a more focused discipline, but these tales are unpredictable, dreamlike and peculiarly alive.
December 21, 2014
Another book that I have a different/higher opinion of than other GR reviewers.
The blurb on the back of the book describes Jung Young Moon, the author of A Most Ambiguous Sunday, as "most often drawing comparisons to Beckett and Kafka" and "drawing heavily on the literature of the absurd." The claims are reasonable enough but I worry that they satisfy the prospective reader's curiosity about the author with a set of predefined stereotypes and drain them of motivation to actually read his work and see for themselves what his writing is really like.
I myself am not a literature type and any reading I did of Beckett and Kafka and the literature of the absurd was done many years ago and long forgotten. I read A Most Ambiguous Sunday simply because I'm very interested in the diverse range of contemporary Korean literature and am making my way through the recently published and very impressive Dalkey Archive Press Korean Literature in Translation series which includes this volume.
The book is a collection of short stories originally published in Korean in 2008. The English versions are the work of several translators, some of whom collaborated directly with the author, who is very interested in translation himself. (The bio at the end of the book makes it known that he has translated more than forty books from English into Korean.) The collection definitely hangs together, but the individual stories are far from all the same (even though they might seem to be to those who are not into his kind of writing). There are fourteen stories in all, filling almost 300 pages. That's a lot of material. My intention here is to say just enough about the individual pieces to give an idea of what's there and how it might be interesting.
Mrs. Brown - a home invasion changes a couple's lives. A "straight" story that seems not so much the lead-off for the collection as a warm-up, serving to ease the reader into the world of the writer and get used to the cadences of his voice.
Joy of Traveling - A couple heads off on a getaway trip, both vaguely disappointed that their bisexual friend K is not with them. They talk as they drive and consider such questions as how well speakers of Danish are able to understand each other.
Afternoon of the Faun - a couple go on a picnic in the woods with a mutual friend who is losing his memory and once had sex with the woman, despite them being cousins. Very sleepy.
A Way of Remembrance - the best story in the book. It's not so much different from the other stories as more intense, a kind of distillation of all the author's favorite themes and techniques. A man and woman story with all the stops pulled out.
Together with a chicken - a day (and night, with dreams) in the life of a man who has chickens on his mind.
At the Amusement Park - solitary musings at an abandoned amusement park
Animal Songs of Boredom and Fury - three stories that I would class as recluse literature. (Think Kamo no Chomei's Ten-Foot-Square Hut.) All three are good but I found the third one particularly moving. It's one of my favorites in the collection.
The End - a man and woman story, told fairly directly. Sad but ever so slightly sentimental.
Volume without Weight - the private thoughts and actions of an invalid father living, if you can call it that, with his son and daughter-in-law. A pathetic old man like one of the characters in Junichiro Tanizaki's late novels (as The Key and especially Dairy of a Mad Old Man) only worse - maybe beyond redemption but not beyond sympathy. My second favorite story after A Way of Remembrance.
Drifting - a mentally damaged street person trying to survive a cold night is taken to the police station, interrogated, evaluated, and, in a quiet way, taken care of by the cops. A pretty accessible story and probably the warmest in the collection.
Losing the Olfactory Sense - another night story like Drifting, only more adrift and way bleaker.
A Most Ambiguous Sunday - another man and woman story, grounded and gentle.
I should explain that what I am calling a man and woman story is one that revolves around the shared experience of a man and a woman, middle-aged or older, whether a couple in the physical sense or simply two people who are somehow attached to each other. The relationship, whatever exactly it may be, is presented in a very distinct way that suggests that the author is drawing on a personal archetype. (Another recurrent feature that could be placed in the same category is an attention to and even preoccupation with animals.)
The stories are all different but at the same time recognizably by the same author. (This goes even for Mrs. Brown, even though it stands at a distance from all the rest.) All the stories have a strong narrative presence and a strong sense of interiority, by which I mean, basically, that the reader experiences what is happening not directly but via the narrator's perceptions and thoughts as he perceives what he perceives and thinks and what he is thinking. But there's more to it than that.
One pronounced feature of this interiority is what I would call self-monitoring. The interior narrator not only expresses his thoughts but observes them as they happen and expresses thoughts about them which can potentially become the material for further thoughts.
Another, very distinctive, feature is the narrator's tendency to drift from a fully conscious into a still conscious but disconnected dreamlike state, a state whose technical name is hypnagogic. All people experience it. It basically means going into or coming out of the sleep state. It may be a common experience, but the author's ability to reproduce it naturally within his narrative is very striking.
Add to these befuddlement and defamiliarization and you have a pretty heady mix. In fact so heady that it's an achievement that the author keeps things under as much control as he does.
I know this book is not for everybody. In fact one of my main intentions in this review is to help people decide whether it is for them or not. But I recommend not deciding too soon. After completing my first read my reaction was essentially three stars - an interesting book but pretty out there. But as a day or two went by I noticed that I was still thinking about it and wondering if my initial reaction was not giving the book its full due. So I went to four stars. But I still didn't feel totally settled, and I extended my consideration to the world in which the book came about - the small, highly institutionalized, highly connection-based, highly normative Korean literary establishment - and decided that it was not only a good and a distinctive book but also a courageous and an important one. That brought it to five full stars for me.
The blurb on the back of the book describes Jung Young Moon, the author of A Most Ambiguous Sunday, as "most often drawing comparisons to Beckett and Kafka" and "drawing heavily on the literature of the absurd." The claims are reasonable enough but I worry that they satisfy the prospective reader's curiosity about the author with a set of predefined stereotypes and drain them of motivation to actually read his work and see for themselves what his writing is really like.
I myself am not a literature type and any reading I did of Beckett and Kafka and the literature of the absurd was done many years ago and long forgotten. I read A Most Ambiguous Sunday simply because I'm very interested in the diverse range of contemporary Korean literature and am making my way through the recently published and very impressive Dalkey Archive Press Korean Literature in Translation series which includes this volume.
The book is a collection of short stories originally published in Korean in 2008. The English versions are the work of several translators, some of whom collaborated directly with the author, who is very interested in translation himself. (The bio at the end of the book makes it known that he has translated more than forty books from English into Korean.) The collection definitely hangs together, but the individual stories are far from all the same (even though they might seem to be to those who are not into his kind of writing). There are fourteen stories in all, filling almost 300 pages. That's a lot of material. My intention here is to say just enough about the individual pieces to give an idea of what's there and how it might be interesting.
Mrs. Brown - a home invasion changes a couple's lives. A "straight" story that seems not so much the lead-off for the collection as a warm-up, serving to ease the reader into the world of the writer and get used to the cadences of his voice.
Joy of Traveling - A couple heads off on a getaway trip, both vaguely disappointed that their bisexual friend K is not with them. They talk as they drive and consider such questions as how well speakers of Danish are able to understand each other.
Afternoon of the Faun - a couple go on a picnic in the woods with a mutual friend who is losing his memory and once had sex with the woman, despite them being cousins. Very sleepy.
A Way of Remembrance - the best story in the book. It's not so much different from the other stories as more intense, a kind of distillation of all the author's favorite themes and techniques. A man and woman story with all the stops pulled out.
Together with a chicken - a day (and night, with dreams) in the life of a man who has chickens on his mind.
At the Amusement Park - solitary musings at an abandoned amusement park
Animal Songs of Boredom and Fury - three stories that I would class as recluse literature. (Think Kamo no Chomei's Ten-Foot-Square Hut.) All three are good but I found the third one particularly moving. It's one of my favorites in the collection.
The End - a man and woman story, told fairly directly. Sad but ever so slightly sentimental.
Volume without Weight - the private thoughts and actions of an invalid father living, if you can call it that, with his son and daughter-in-law. A pathetic old man like one of the characters in Junichiro Tanizaki's late novels (as The Key and especially Dairy of a Mad Old Man) only worse - maybe beyond redemption but not beyond sympathy. My second favorite story after A Way of Remembrance.
Drifting - a mentally damaged street person trying to survive a cold night is taken to the police station, interrogated, evaluated, and, in a quiet way, taken care of by the cops. A pretty accessible story and probably the warmest in the collection.
Losing the Olfactory Sense - another night story like Drifting, only more adrift and way bleaker.
A Most Ambiguous Sunday - another man and woman story, grounded and gentle.
I should explain that what I am calling a man and woman story is one that revolves around the shared experience of a man and a woman, middle-aged or older, whether a couple in the physical sense or simply two people who are somehow attached to each other. The relationship, whatever exactly it may be, is presented in a very distinct way that suggests that the author is drawing on a personal archetype. (Another recurrent feature that could be placed in the same category is an attention to and even preoccupation with animals.)
The stories are all different but at the same time recognizably by the same author. (This goes even for Mrs. Brown, even though it stands at a distance from all the rest.) All the stories have a strong narrative presence and a strong sense of interiority, by which I mean, basically, that the reader experiences what is happening not directly but via the narrator's perceptions and thoughts as he perceives what he perceives and thinks and what he is thinking. But there's more to it than that.
One pronounced feature of this interiority is what I would call self-monitoring. The interior narrator not only expresses his thoughts but observes them as they happen and expresses thoughts about them which can potentially become the material for further thoughts.
Another, very distinctive, feature is the narrator's tendency to drift from a fully conscious into a still conscious but disconnected dreamlike state, a state whose technical name is hypnagogic. All people experience it. It basically means going into or coming out of the sleep state. It may be a common experience, but the author's ability to reproduce it naturally within his narrative is very striking.
Add to these befuddlement and defamiliarization and you have a pretty heady mix. In fact so heady that it's an achievement that the author keeps things under as much control as he does.
I know this book is not for everybody. In fact one of my main intentions in this review is to help people decide whether it is for them or not. But I recommend not deciding too soon. After completing my first read my reaction was essentially three stars - an interesting book but pretty out there. But as a day or two went by I noticed that I was still thinking about it and wondering if my initial reaction was not giving the book its full due. So I went to four stars. But I still didn't feel totally settled, and I extended my consideration to the world in which the book came about - the small, highly institutionalized, highly connection-based, highly normative Korean literary establishment - and decided that it was not only a good and a distinctive book but also a courageous and an important one. That brought it to five full stars for me.
February 13, 2016
Cannot wait to publish Jung's amazing novel Vaseline Buddha in July. This short story collection is a perfect introduction to his work, also excited for Dalkey Archive's forthcoming novel from him called A Contrived World, and if there's one quote from this book that welcomes you into Jung's world of Kafka-meets-Beckett-via-South Korea brilliance, it is this one:
"How pleasant it feels to walk briskly through the silver grass, letting the grass lash my face and chest with their tough stems! And how calming it is to lie down on the field, panting from exhaustion, and watch the grass swaying in the wind! Strangely enough, such useless acts made me feel that I was one with mature, or at least that I was part of nature, and I came to realize anew how wonderfully useful uselessness is to me. Nature, however, makes me feel as if I've been abandoned, rather than making me feel that I'm a part of nature, and strangely enough, when I feel this way, I feel as if I understand what nature is thinking."
"How pleasant it feels to walk briskly through the silver grass, letting the grass lash my face and chest with their tough stems! And how calming it is to lie down on the field, panting from exhaustion, and watch the grass swaying in the wind! Strangely enough, such useless acts made me feel that I was one with mature, or at least that I was part of nature, and I came to realize anew how wonderfully useful uselessness is to me. Nature, however, makes me feel as if I've been abandoned, rather than making me feel that I'm a part of nature, and strangely enough, when I feel this way, I feel as if I understand what nature is thinking."
February 18, 2015
A Most Ambiguous Sunday (review copy courtesy of the publisher) is a collection of fourteen lengthy stories by Korean writer Jung Young Moon, running in total to just under 300 pages. The back cover claims that the writer is “considered an eccentric in the traditional Korean literary world”, and having read this collection, I can only agree. Readers who enjoy simple stories with important things like plots and characters should probably move along – nothing for you to see here , I’m afraid.
Those who are a little more prepared to trust the writer, though, ready to take a leap of faith in the hope that all will gradually come clear, will find a lot to enjoy in Jung’s idiosyncratic tales. The beauty of the stories is less in what they say and more in how they’re constructed and in the mood the writer conjures up. At times, he overreaches himself, and you might find yourself glazing over and wondering where the last five minutes went, but on the whole, the stories have a hypnotic pull, drawing the reader effortlessly through to the final page.
Many of the stories are notable for the feeling of calm they extend, even when the protagonists should be anything but. In ‘Mrs. Brown’, one of the better-known stories, a brutal home invasion turns into a polite afternoon tea party as the hostess absent-mindedly ponders the state of her marriage, almost ignoring the gun being waved around. ‘Drifting’ sees a vagrant, a man who has spent time in mental institutions, wander the freezing streets before being taken to the police station. Yet despite the aggressive nature of the detectives who interrogate him, the whole affair passes as if in a dream, leaving the characters (and the reader) untouched.
Other stories don’t even pretend to have much of a plot, allowing the characters to act as they please as their words swirl aimlessly around. A good example is ‘The Joy of Traveling’, in which two friends drive around, half-expecting a third friend who is unlikely to appear:
They knew where their conversation was going. It was sure to keep getting sidetracked, with no point to it whatsoever. That was the reason, too, why it was satisfying to talk to her. Their conversations never had a point, and so they never reached any point.
‘The Joy of Travelling’, p.35 (Dalkey Archive Press, 2013)
This lack of action reaches its peak in the story ‘Together with a Chicken’, a piece which simply consists of idle ramblings of the most exquisite variety:
I said that to the invisible chicken next to me, which agreed.
‘Together with a Chicken’, p.108
Now if ever there was a line I wish I had written, that’s pretty much it.
One of the themes that does occasionally appear is the melancholy of existence, and several of the stories show people wandering around in settings enhancing a mood of loss. ‘At the Amusement Park’ has a man slipping into an abandoned complex, sitting in old attractions and remembering his younger days, while the protagonist of ‘Losing the Olfactory Sense’ wanders the streets of a town doomed to be flooded by a newly constructed dam, a place of silence and dust.
This theme also pervades an interesting trilogy of stories in the middle of the collection, ‘Animal Songs of Boredom and Fury’, in which a man who has turned his back on civilisation spends his time by the river, in a cave by the sea and at the top of an abandoned lighthouse. Again, there is no real direction to the stories – in fact, we’re not even completely sure that the nameless central character is the same one in each part. These are stories without location, timeless, a literary laboratory outside the normal world to experiment with… something.
You might wonder, seeing as many of the stories appear to lack any content, what actually makes them worth reading, and the answer is, of course, the writing. Jung enjoys playing with words, repeating them almost to the point of stripping them of their meaning, characters talking for the sake of talking, enjoying the idea and sound of conversation rather than the content:
…and what we enjoyed was the feeling of certain words in the rambling conversation being repeated and reiterated so that a certain rhythm was felt, and the feeling of listlessness created by that feeling.
In this way, our conversations were ones that not so much broke free from reality as deviated from reality, and our reality lay in a place that deviated from reality, but that reality was more real to us than any other reality, and we knew that what made reality insignificant was none other than insignificant realism.
‘A Way of Remembrance’, p.87
Don’t be too hard on the speaker here – he is talking about (and to) a corpse.
In a book like this, then, the translation is crucial, and on the whole this was a good effort. As you may have noticed, I didn’t credit the translator above, and that was deliberate, because there were actually too many of them to name at that point. Two of the stories were joint efforts between the writer and two well-known names in K-Lit (Sora Kim-Russell for one, Krys Lee for the other) while the majority of the stories were divided between Jung Yewon and the team of Louis Vinciguerra and Inrae You Vinciguerra. One interesting thing I found (and I’m not sure others would agree with me), is that the stories translated by the Vinciguerras appeared slightly less abstract and more plot-centred whereas Jung’s efforts were often more about the effect of the words. This may just be due to the choice of stories, but I certainly felt a slight difference in style in the last five stories. If anyone would like to weigh in on that, I’d be most grateful.
A Most Ambiguous Sunday has been described as a typical Dalkey Archive book, and I’m not going to dispute that. Jung Young Moon, on the basis of this collection, will not be to everyone’s liking, but if you enjoy hypnotic, repetitive sentences musing on the emptiness of life (Beckett is a reference point I’ve seen mentioned several times), this might be a book for you. I won’t pretend that I understand everything the writer wanted to say, but I did enjoy it immensely. It’s a book to take your time over, one to read on a lazy, sunny day.
Preferably in the company of a chicken ;)
*****
This post was originally posted over at my main blog, Tony's Reading List (WordPress).
Those who are a little more prepared to trust the writer, though, ready to take a leap of faith in the hope that all will gradually come clear, will find a lot to enjoy in Jung’s idiosyncratic tales. The beauty of the stories is less in what they say and more in how they’re constructed and in the mood the writer conjures up. At times, he overreaches himself, and you might find yourself glazing over and wondering where the last five minutes went, but on the whole, the stories have a hypnotic pull, drawing the reader effortlessly through to the final page.
Many of the stories are notable for the feeling of calm they extend, even when the protagonists should be anything but. In ‘Mrs. Brown’, one of the better-known stories, a brutal home invasion turns into a polite afternoon tea party as the hostess absent-mindedly ponders the state of her marriage, almost ignoring the gun being waved around. ‘Drifting’ sees a vagrant, a man who has spent time in mental institutions, wander the freezing streets before being taken to the police station. Yet despite the aggressive nature of the detectives who interrogate him, the whole affair passes as if in a dream, leaving the characters (and the reader) untouched.
Other stories don’t even pretend to have much of a plot, allowing the characters to act as they please as their words swirl aimlessly around. A good example is ‘The Joy of Traveling’, in which two friends drive around, half-expecting a third friend who is unlikely to appear:
They knew where their conversation was going. It was sure to keep getting sidetracked, with no point to it whatsoever. That was the reason, too, why it was satisfying to talk to her. Their conversations never had a point, and so they never reached any point.
‘The Joy of Travelling’, p.35 (Dalkey Archive Press, 2013)
This lack of action reaches its peak in the story ‘Together with a Chicken’, a piece which simply consists of idle ramblings of the most exquisite variety:
I said that to the invisible chicken next to me, which agreed.
‘Together with a Chicken’, p.108
Now if ever there was a line I wish I had written, that’s pretty much it.
One of the themes that does occasionally appear is the melancholy of existence, and several of the stories show people wandering around in settings enhancing a mood of loss. ‘At the Amusement Park’ has a man slipping into an abandoned complex, sitting in old attractions and remembering his younger days, while the protagonist of ‘Losing the Olfactory Sense’ wanders the streets of a town doomed to be flooded by a newly constructed dam, a place of silence and dust.
This theme also pervades an interesting trilogy of stories in the middle of the collection, ‘Animal Songs of Boredom and Fury’, in which a man who has turned his back on civilisation spends his time by the river, in a cave by the sea and at the top of an abandoned lighthouse. Again, there is no real direction to the stories – in fact, we’re not even completely sure that the nameless central character is the same one in each part. These are stories without location, timeless, a literary laboratory outside the normal world to experiment with… something.
You might wonder, seeing as many of the stories appear to lack any content, what actually makes them worth reading, and the answer is, of course, the writing. Jung enjoys playing with words, repeating them almost to the point of stripping them of their meaning, characters talking for the sake of talking, enjoying the idea and sound of conversation rather than the content:
…and what we enjoyed was the feeling of certain words in the rambling conversation being repeated and reiterated so that a certain rhythm was felt, and the feeling of listlessness created by that feeling.
In this way, our conversations were ones that not so much broke free from reality as deviated from reality, and our reality lay in a place that deviated from reality, but that reality was more real to us than any other reality, and we knew that what made reality insignificant was none other than insignificant realism.
‘A Way of Remembrance’, p.87
Don’t be too hard on the speaker here – he is talking about (and to) a corpse.
In a book like this, then, the translation is crucial, and on the whole this was a good effort. As you may have noticed, I didn’t credit the translator above, and that was deliberate, because there were actually too many of them to name at that point. Two of the stories were joint efforts between the writer and two well-known names in K-Lit (Sora Kim-Russell for one, Krys Lee for the other) while the majority of the stories were divided between Jung Yewon and the team of Louis Vinciguerra and Inrae You Vinciguerra. One interesting thing I found (and I’m not sure others would agree with me), is that the stories translated by the Vinciguerras appeared slightly less abstract and more plot-centred whereas Jung’s efforts were often more about the effect of the words. This may just be due to the choice of stories, but I certainly felt a slight difference in style in the last five stories. If anyone would like to weigh in on that, I’d be most grateful.
A Most Ambiguous Sunday has been described as a typical Dalkey Archive book, and I’m not going to dispute that. Jung Young Moon, on the basis of this collection, will not be to everyone’s liking, but if you enjoy hypnotic, repetitive sentences musing on the emptiness of life (Beckett is a reference point I’ve seen mentioned several times), this might be a book for you. I won’t pretend that I understand everything the writer wanted to say, but I did enjoy it immensely. It’s a book to take your time over, one to read on a lazy, sunny day.
Preferably in the company of a chicken ;)
*****
This post was originally posted over at my main blog, Tony's Reading List (WordPress).
June 26, 2014
With the back cover promoting Jung as Korea's Samuel Beckett, I set out to read this book with as much enjoyment as I get from Beckett's plays. However, it took me several month to finish this book because reading it felt like pulling teeth to me.
More than being difficult to read, the introspective, self-reflective nature of the short stories kept pushing me into my own introspective thoughts and make me read while not absorbing anything. It is a strange quality in a book rather than to pull the reader in, to push them so deep in themselves they can't remember what they've just read on the page.
Out of the short stories, I can't really recommend a favorite. I kept confusing plots and characters because none of them had names and often spoke/thought in the same tone of voice. Sometimes I was convinced that some of the characters were the same from one story to another, but there were no clues confirming or denying this assumption.
I would not recommend this book as an introduction to Korean literature because it has only vestiges of 'Koreaness' in the stories. It is much more about the mental state of the Author and his characters than trying to convey Korean culture. Be that as it may, it is an interesting book, but just not well suited to me. I think if I wasn't so determined to finish it, I would have given up in the middle of a couple of the stories and skip on to the next one.
More than being difficult to read, the introspective, self-reflective nature of the short stories kept pushing me into my own introspective thoughts and make me read while not absorbing anything. It is a strange quality in a book rather than to pull the reader in, to push them so deep in themselves they can't remember what they've just read on the page.
Out of the short stories, I can't really recommend a favorite. I kept confusing plots and characters because none of them had names and often spoke/thought in the same tone of voice. Sometimes I was convinced that some of the characters were the same from one story to another, but there were no clues confirming or denying this assumption.
I would not recommend this book as an introduction to Korean literature because it has only vestiges of 'Koreaness' in the stories. It is much more about the mental state of the Author and his characters than trying to convey Korean culture. Be that as it may, it is an interesting book, but just not well suited to me. I think if I wasn't so determined to finish it, I would have given up in the middle of a couple of the stories and skip on to the next one.
May 30, 2014
I am going to chalk this one up to probably missing some sort of cultural goings-on. Other than three of these stories, I was utterly bored. My guess is that these are commentaries in one manner or other on Korean society, but without a familiarity on my end, they just end up missing the mark and coming off as empty little vignettes of abnormal life.
At the end of this book (as with the four prior entries into the Library of Korean Literature), I asked myself why the publishers would feel that this book needed to be translated and published into english. I came up empty handed.
At the end of this book (as with the four prior entries into the Library of Korean Literature), I asked myself why the publishers would feel that this book needed to be translated and published into english. I came up empty handed.
July 20, 2015
In between like and dislike-- strange, 'plain' and questionable but somehow charming and sentimental.
I like Drifting more than others (and i personally like the first paragraph of A Most Ambiguous Sunday, and the story itself was okay).
ps: if i could read the stories in its original language, i might have this book on my favorite shelf, i think.
I like Drifting more than others (and i personally like the first paragraph of A Most Ambiguous Sunday, and the story itself was okay).
ps: if i could read the stories in its original language, i might have this book on my favorite shelf, i think.
October 25, 2014
You'd have to like "post-modern" fiction to enjoy this set of stories that intend to use semi-random collections of memories and thoughts as plots.
I'm not that guy.
If you are? Go to town.
The first story "Mrs. Brown" was most enjoyable to me and can also be purchased individually in the ASIA Publishers series of Korean fiction...
I'm not that guy.
If you are? Go to town.
The first story "Mrs. Brown" was most enjoyable to me and can also be purchased individually in the ASIA Publishers series of Korean fiction...
November 30, 2016
Strange...the vivid feelings I felt just a moment ago have vanished and now everything is ambiguous to me. I barely feel the existence of anything. And today, which hasn't even ended yet, already feels like ancient history, like some long-forgotten day from my childhood. All the days seem like Sunday, too, as if only Sunday exists,' he mumbles.
목신의 어떤 오후by 정 영문 (Jung Young-Moon) has been translated into English as "A Most Ambiguous Sunday and other stories".
"목신의 어떤 오후" is the name of one of the stories, translated into English as "Afternoon of a Faun" (from the Debussy piece), while the English title "Most Ambiguous Sunday" is taken from the final story in the collection ("더없이 어렴풋한 일요일" in the original). Normally I'm not a big fan of changing titles in translation, but the English title does better capture, in English at least, the strange mood of these stories, and is taken from the quote above.
The stories have been translated by a variety of translators, primarily Jung Yewon, and the team of Inrae You and Louis Vinciguerra. Two stories were translated by the author himself in conjunction with Sora Kim-Russell and Krys Lee, who are credited after the respective stories, but oddly not on the title page.
This is not a conventional short story collection and in particular not one with conventional characters. The dominant tones are absurd and obscure, darkly humorous, narrators who simply don't conform to the confines of the conventional world - wanderers both physically and mentally, highly introspective. The best way I can describe this is from the self-descriptions in the stories themselves:
They knew where their conversation was going. It was sure to keep getting sidetracked, with no point to it whatsoever. That was the reason, too, why it was satisfying to talk to her. Their conversations never had a point, and so they never reached any point.
...
Our friend, who had an unknowable side to him much like his father, thought of himself as an autodidact, although he wouldn't have used that term. Though he had a bit of a self-educated air about him, there wasn't much there. He continued to delve into a number of obscure topics. Once he became very interested in the wings and eyes of a certain species of fish and fowl, and read a number of books on the topic. But his interest never stayed long on one topic, and soon he followed another topic of interest. It was no surprise that even if jellyfish and moss had meant nothing to him before, once he began learning about them, they would become a large presence in his life and would dominate his thoughts. As a self-educated man his studies lacked depth and he sure wasn't opening up any new territory in the relevant field. As if an autodidact had to appear to stay under a certain level of learning, unlike a professional researcher, his interest stayed at a level which was just enough to satisfy his capricious curiosity.
...
What we enjoyed was the feeling of certain words in the rambling conversation being repeated and reiterated so that a certain rhythm was felt, and the feeling of listlessness created by that feeling.
At it's worst the stories can become a little rambling, almost random, but there is a distinct change of tone in the second half of the collection towards more focused, powerful and slightly blacker stories. My favourite was "Drifting" an almost Bernardian monologue by an elderly housebound man against his "bastard" son (in both senses of the word).
And the title story - at least in English - contains my favourite quote of the collection:
"The sky looks extremely blue today," he says. "It looks like it's scared of something. And the blue is quite dark, like the blue of a bruise."
Overall a difficult work to rate. Was it entirely successful - no - but is it something genuinely different, thought provoking and literary - certainly yes.
목신의 어떤 오후by 정 영문 (Jung Young-Moon) has been translated into English as "A Most Ambiguous Sunday and other stories".
"목신의 어떤 오후" is the name of one of the stories, translated into English as "Afternoon of a Faun" (from the Debussy piece), while the English title "Most Ambiguous Sunday" is taken from the final story in the collection ("더없이 어렴풋한 일요일" in the original). Normally I'm not a big fan of changing titles in translation, but the English title does better capture, in English at least, the strange mood of these stories, and is taken from the quote above.
The stories have been translated by a variety of translators, primarily Jung Yewon, and the team of Inrae You and Louis Vinciguerra. Two stories were translated by the author himself in conjunction with Sora Kim-Russell and Krys Lee, who are credited after the respective stories, but oddly not on the title page.
This is not a conventional short story collection and in particular not one with conventional characters. The dominant tones are absurd and obscure, darkly humorous, narrators who simply don't conform to the confines of the conventional world - wanderers both physically and mentally, highly introspective. The best way I can describe this is from the self-descriptions in the stories themselves:
They knew where their conversation was going. It was sure to keep getting sidetracked, with no point to it whatsoever. That was the reason, too, why it was satisfying to talk to her. Their conversations never had a point, and so they never reached any point.
...
Our friend, who had an unknowable side to him much like his father, thought of himself as an autodidact, although he wouldn't have used that term. Though he had a bit of a self-educated air about him, there wasn't much there. He continued to delve into a number of obscure topics. Once he became very interested in the wings and eyes of a certain species of fish and fowl, and read a number of books on the topic. But his interest never stayed long on one topic, and soon he followed another topic of interest. It was no surprise that even if jellyfish and moss had meant nothing to him before, once he began learning about them, they would become a large presence in his life and would dominate his thoughts. As a self-educated man his studies lacked depth and he sure wasn't opening up any new territory in the relevant field. As if an autodidact had to appear to stay under a certain level of learning, unlike a professional researcher, his interest stayed at a level which was just enough to satisfy his capricious curiosity.
...
What we enjoyed was the feeling of certain words in the rambling conversation being repeated and reiterated so that a certain rhythm was felt, and the feeling of listlessness created by that feeling.
At it's worst the stories can become a little rambling, almost random, but there is a distinct change of tone in the second half of the collection towards more focused, powerful and slightly blacker stories. My favourite was "Drifting" an almost Bernardian monologue by an elderly housebound man against his "bastard" son (in both senses of the word).
And the title story - at least in English - contains my favourite quote of the collection:
"The sky looks extremely blue today," he says. "It looks like it's scared of something. And the blue is quite dark, like the blue of a bruise."
Overall a difficult work to rate. Was it entirely successful - no - but is it something genuinely different, thought provoking and literary - certainly yes.
dnf-might-revisit
July 26, 2020Since this is a dnf for me (at least for now), this is my review thus far. I won't give it a rating since I haven't finished it yet.
The first story was excellent. Probably 5 stars. The next two were ok. But it went seriously downhill from there. The other stories reminded me of "A Contrived World", by the same author, which I started and could never finish. I'm not sure if I'll continue this book.
Also, since Goodreads doesn't allow enough space for my personal notes, I am going to write a brief summary of each story here below. This is for my own notes, so it is full of Spoilers.
SPOILERS BELOW!
Mrs. Brown - A Korean lady married an American and they're living somehere in the midwest. A young man shows up to rob their house, and is soon joined by his girlfriend. During the robbery the wife thinks about her married life and realizes she wants a divorce. The robbery ends with the two being caught and taken away. We find out that the lady then divorced her husband and took flying lessons
The Joy of Traveling - The protagonist gives the feeling of a 3rd wheel. He and a girl go on a trip, which was K's idea. K is a bisexual friend of both. Most of the story is each of them reminiscing on meeting up in Europe and life in Korea.
- Another 3rd wheel feeling. A girl and a guy and the protagonist. The girl and guy are cousins, but also hooked up (we find out toward the end). The guy seems to have neurological issues, and seems to be fading a bit. Most of the story is filled with their inane meanderings and thoughts. A man shows up looking for his dog, but they don't take it seriously and make odd remarks.
A way of remembrance - Probably the darkest of all the stories. It seems to be about mosquitoes, or frog, but it turns out the narrator's companion (wife?) was dead when he woke up one morning, so he buried her in their garden and frankly seems to be a bit off. The entire story is the meandering of his (possibly disturbed) mind.
Together with a Chicken - What?? These stories are getting weirder and weirder. A guy hears a rooster, tells his lady friend about it. Then he says he has a habit of taking more and more sleeping pills until he falls asleep. Then he takes us through his drug-addled dream while slowly falling asleep. It involved scenes of nature and animals and some other weird things.
At the Amusement Park - Some guy sneaks into an amusement park that has long since been abandoned. He reminisces about the amusement park and other stuff. He gets on a marry-go-round horse and falls off. He gets on a children's ride of a plane and tries to make it fall but it doesn't....
Animal Song of Boredom of Fury, Part One: The Sound of the Alarm in the Water - Ok, what's happening? These stories are getting weirder and weirder. Some guy is living along the shore and eating fish and berries and reminiscing about his girlfriend and how she killed their two parrots in a fit of rage or something. Then he sees a watch underwater, and a bull on the bridge, and his mind keeps wandering.
Animal Song of Boredom of Fury, Part Two: The Cave Dweller: Ok I might have to dnf this book, or at least take a break. Some guy lives in a cave, reminisces about an ex-gf who played the cello and about his pet rabbit who drowned. He eats sardines and other fish from cans, and then some fisherman gives him a hook, but it doesn't work without bait. But he's able to use a net some catch some fish. Yeah. That's it.
The first story was excellent. Probably 5 stars. The next two were ok. But it went seriously downhill from there. The other stories reminded me of "A Contrived World", by the same author, which I started and could never finish. I'm not sure if I'll continue this book.
Also, since Goodreads doesn't allow enough space for my personal notes, I am going to write a brief summary of each story here below. This is for my own notes, so it is full of Spoilers.
SPOILERS BELOW!
Mrs. Brown - A Korean lady married an American and they're living somehere in the midwest. A young man shows up to rob their house, and is soon joined by his girlfriend. During the robbery the wife thinks about her married life and realizes she wants a divorce. The robbery ends with the two being caught and taken away. We find out that the lady then divorced her husband and took flying lessons
The Joy of Traveling - The protagonist gives the feeling of a 3rd wheel. He and a girl go on a trip, which was K's idea. K is a bisexual friend of both. Most of the story is each of them reminiscing on meeting up in Europe and life in Korea.
- Another 3rd wheel feeling. A girl and a guy and the protagonist. The girl and guy are cousins, but also hooked up (we find out toward the end). The guy seems to have neurological issues, and seems to be fading a bit. Most of the story is filled with their inane meanderings and thoughts. A man shows up looking for his dog, but they don't take it seriously and make odd remarks.
A way of remembrance - Probably the darkest of all the stories. It seems to be about mosquitoes, or frog, but it turns out the narrator's companion (wife?) was dead when he woke up one morning, so he buried her in their garden and frankly seems to be a bit off. The entire story is the meandering of his (possibly disturbed) mind.
Together with a Chicken - What?? These stories are getting weirder and weirder. A guy hears a rooster, tells his lady friend about it. Then he says he has a habit of taking more and more sleeping pills until he falls asleep. Then he takes us through his drug-addled dream while slowly falling asleep. It involved scenes of nature and animals and some other weird things.
At the Amusement Park - Some guy sneaks into an amusement park that has long since been abandoned. He reminisces about the amusement park and other stuff. He gets on a marry-go-round horse and falls off. He gets on a children's ride of a plane and tries to make it fall but it doesn't....
Animal Song of Boredom of Fury, Part One: The Sound of the Alarm in the Water - Ok, what's happening? These stories are getting weirder and weirder. Some guy is living along the shore and eating fish and berries and reminiscing about his girlfriend and how she killed their two parrots in a fit of rage or something. Then he sees a watch underwater, and a bull on the bridge, and his mind keeps wandering.
Animal Song of Boredom of Fury, Part Two: The Cave Dweller: Ok I might have to dnf this book, or at least take a break. Some guy lives in a cave, reminisces about an ex-gf who played the cello and about his pet rabbit who drowned. He eats sardines and other fish from cans, and then some fisherman gives him a hook, but it doesn't work without bait. But he's able to use a net some catch some fish. Yeah. That's it.
December 13, 2014
This is the first book in a long, long time, where I just don't feel I can finish it. I just can't find a reason to keep going.
July 30, 2014
6,5/10
April 26, 2021
Favorites:
- A Way of Remembrance
- Volume Without Weight
- A Way of Remembrance
- Volume Without Weight
October 1, 2025
The first story, while kind of pointless, was interesting at least.
I forced myself to read two more, then struggled with two more after that and quit both of them almost immediately.
This seems like it's more an exercise in writing in a particular style than anything else; all the short stories are just whimsy and repeated motifs, but there's no point to any of them. blah.
I forced myself to read two more, then struggled with two more after that and quit both of them almost immediately.
This seems like it's more an exercise in writing in a particular style than anything else; all the short stories are just whimsy and repeated motifs, but there's no point to any of them. blah.
July 15, 2025
Watch my review on YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RgYzj...
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