The Human Jungle

by Jo Jung-rae, Cho Chongnae, Bruce Fulton (Translator)

Equal parts muckraking novel, transnational love story, and socially engaged panorama, Cho Chongnae’s The Human Jungle portrays China on the verge of becoming the world’s dominant economic force.

Against a backdrop of rapidly morphing urban landscapes, readers meet migrant workers, Korean manufacturers out to save a few bucks, high-flying venture capitalists, street thugs, and shakedown artists. The picture of China that emerges is at turns unsettling, awe-inspiring, and heart-breaking. Chongnae deftly portrays a giant awakening to its own raw, volatile, and often uncontrollable power.

Translators Bruce Fulton and Ju-Chan Fulton have condensed three of Chongnae’s Korean novels, each of which sold more than one million copies in South Korea, into this single English-language edition.

Cho Chongnae is one of Korea’s most important living writers. He is best known for a trio of massive historical novels: the ten-volume T’aebaek Mountains (1989), the twelve-volume Arirang (1995), and the ten-volume Han River (2002). Cho lives in Seoul, South Korea.

Bruce Fulton and Ju-Chan Fulton are the translators of numerous volumes of modern Korean fiction, including the award-winning women’s anthologies Words of Farewell and Wayfarer, and, with Marshall R. Pihl, Land of Exile: Contemporary Korean Fiction. They have received two National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowships, including the first ever given for a translation from the Korean language, and the first residency at the Banff International Literary Translation Centre awarded to translators from any Asian language. Bruce Fulton is the inaugural holder of the Young-Bin Min Chair in Korean Literature and Literary Translation at the University of British Columbia.

432 pages, Paperback

First published April 12, 2016

About the author

Jo Jung-Rae has devoted his entire life to literature. His writings attain an excellence that marks him as a world-class author. His popular multi-volume novels Taebaek Mountain Range and Arirang, which have become modern classics since their publication in the 1980s, are considered the epitome of his talent. With the publication of Han River in 2002, Jo completed his trilogy of works on Korean modern history. Sales reached a record-breaking number in Korea-- over 10,000,000 copies.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jo_Jung-rae

Reviews

[Ian Rodriguez · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good, if dense, read. The story moves through different groups of medical entrepreneurs trying to get a foothold in China and their relative levels of connections. It’s has a lot of background on doing business in China presented as story; I feel some characters were more sketches than authentic people.

[Barry Welsh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Watch my review on YouTube here - https://youtu.be/JA7kYY21hoA

[Cindy · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting, albeit ethnocentric, social and economic commentary on China. I would not recommend it for those looking to be thrilled, because the novel progresses as "manmandi, manmandi" ("slowly, slowly") as it contends that Chinese people do.

[Frederike Engeland · Rating 3 out of 5]

A good read if you want to get a taste of what doing business in China might be like. But it does seem like the author is trying to hard to be educational. Conversations seem artificial. It also is full of stereotypes, as far as I can judge that. Still, interesting read.

[Julie · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was probably the only one I've ever read that was set in modern China. I stopped reading it and had forgotten the plot by the time I returned to it, but still read on because it was a unique perspective.

[John Armstrong · Rating 2 out of 5]

Perhaps interesting as an extended op-ed on run-away capitalism in 21st century China and the impossibly unlevel playing field S Koreans face trying to do business there, but absolutely terrible as a novel. The characters are lifeless cardboard cutouts who exist only to illustrate the author's points. All Korean characters are good, Japanese are bad and Chinese are worse, and the love story promised in the blurb is completely stereotyped and uninteresting.

[Adam Calhoun · Rating 1 out of 5]

I wanted to like The Human Jungle. I really did. A muckraking take on the fascinating world of China, told from a Korean perspective? How interesting does that sound??

While it sounds interesting, something was deeply lacking. Was it the translation or the original writing? It is hard to tell. The characters routinely spout the most childish sounding nonsense that it hard to take anything seriously. I have finished reading almost every single book I have ever started but I could not make it more than halfway through this book. I kept hoping that it would get better, but the characters kept saying the stupidest things in ways that betrayed a fundamental misunderstanding of a vast range of topics that were supposedly being muckraked.

On the other hand, the graphic design of the cover (and the whole book!) is fantastic.