2025.11.20
It’s been a month. Sorry blog.
This month I tackled Bae Myung-hoon’s Tower, translated by Sung Ryu (Honford Star) and The Cabinet by Kim Un-su, translated by Sean Lin Halbert.
Both are a series of interconnected short-stories. Both lean heavy into allegory.
The Cabinet deals with people who have developed mutations, whose cases are collected by a scientist who locks their paperwork in a cabinet. The backdrop is Korea post IMF-crisis. The two cases that were most memorable: One is of a man who has a ginkgo tree growing out of his finger. He begins to see his life as something he has to sacrifice for the tree’s health. He ends up disappearing to the mountains and lets the tree engulf him. Another tale is of a woman with a lizard growing in her mouth. She lets the lizard burrow into her tongue and eventually the lizard eats her. They are both really Deleuzian, the becoming-tree or becoming-lizard subject. Are these stories about the desire for the other or the quest to become other than the self? At first I thought maybe the message is that in order to love something you have to go all the way, you have to be willing to sacrifice and accept the danger that what you love may kill you. However, when comparing the tree man and lizard lady to other stories, I began to feel differently. The story of the narrator of The Cabinet for instance. After losing his job he spends whatever money he has left over on beer. He spends a month doing nothing but drinking beer. He drinks tens of thousands of beers. The narrator also has a female co-worker who happens to be severely overweight. One night they go for sushi, all-you-can-eat, and the woman eats and eats and eats and eats a superhuman amount of sushi. What the beer drinking and sushi eating stories have in common with the lizard lady and the gingko tree man is that each character is seeking their own destruction. The big difference between binge drinking/eating and letting a tree or lizard eat you is that the ginkgko guy and lizard lady made the conscious decision that they wanted to sacrifice their lives for other beings. Is that love? TERRIBLE PRESENCE, EAT ME OR DIE, Ginsberg says to the dying lion in his poem “The Lion for Real.”If the sushi lady sacrificed herself in her love of sushi, is that wrong? What about beer? Is beer to die for? I once had a student who loved beer so much he said call me Beer Darius. I wonder where he is now? Maybe he is just Beer, no Darius. Every time I drink beer I think about Beer Darius.
Tower was the less interesting of the two books . The fact that the undercover agent who is in charge of blowing up the tower is the only Muslim character in the book bothered me. Also that there were times where the content or the dialogue came off as, what, prudish? Vanilla? The best character in the book is a gentle elephant. The gentle elephant drinks tear gas and goes berserk and jumps out of a window to its death.
Reading both books, there were many moments in the English where I was pushed out of the story because I couldn’t help but feeling like I was reading a translation. Just off the top of my head, there was the phonetic spelling of Janax instead of Xanax in The Cabinet and several moments that seemed like the context was sensitized or diluted in Tower to prevent offending the reader. I don’t fault the translators. Translators are not perfect. But I do wonder how much effort the editors put into giving feedback before publication. And also, if these presses even have money to pay editors to give feedback. We live in a world with lots of books but less and less paid editors.
I also saw the new Guillermo del Toro film Frankenstein. I don’t have time now to write much, but what I will say is this: The movie is not about Frankenstein or the monster. Frankenstein is a comment about AI. We are letting promethean desire to create override moral responsibility. We are bringing something into the world whose being we don’t understand. The movie got that part right. In that way it is not unlike the film Oppenheimer or the book The Maniac by Benjamin Labatut. We will go over both of those later this semester. Maybe then I will also write about Frankenstein. Fitting with the AI theme, I leave you with an AI generated image of the book covers on a table in front of Frankenstein (as played by Boris Karloff). If you look at the book covers, something is not quite right. Entering the uncanny valley. Wow. Now that is scary.
