There a Petal Silently Falls
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Ch'oe Yun
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Translated by:
Bruce Fulton
About this book
In this collection's title work, There a Petal Silently Falls, Ch'oe explores both the genesis and the aftershocks of historical outrages such as the Kwangju Massacre of 1980, in which a reported 2,000 civilians were killed for protesting government military rule. The novella follows the wanderings of a girl traumatized by her mother's murder and strikes home the injustice of state-sanctioned violence against men and especially women. "Whisper Yet" illuminates the harsh treatment of leftist intellectuals during the years of national division, at the same time offering the hope of reconciliation between ideological enemies. The third story, "The Thirteen-Scent Flower," satirizes consumerism and academic rivalries by focusing on a young man and woman who engender an exotic flower that is coveted far and wide for its various fragrances.
Elegantly crafted and quietly moving, Ch'oe Yun's stories are among the most incisive portrayals of the psychological and spiritual reality of post-World War II Korea. Her fiction, which began to appear in the late 1980s, represents a turn toward a more experimental, deconstructionist, and postmodern Korean style of writing, and offers a new focus on the role of gender in the making of Korean history.
Author / Editor information
Reviews
Youngju Ryu:
Beyond Korean Studies... [this] book should also be read widely by scholars engaged in trauma studies.
David McCann:
It is a great pleasure to see this book added to the Weatherhead Books on Asia list.
A very welcome addition to existing works of Korean literature in English translation.
Barbara Lloyd McMichael:
Ch'oe is a versatile writer who cloaks stark perceptions of individual and social trauma with elegant craft, poignant metaphor, and occasional, sardonic flashes of humor.
These three stories are the work of a fiction writer of the very highest order.
Haunting, painful and affirming, full of illusions and hallucinations while rooted in the graphically physical.... Everything about Yun's work is brilliant.
Janet Poole, assistant professor of East Asian studies, University of Toronto:
There a Petal Silently Falls, by one of contemporary South Korea's most respected authors, was an early attempt to confront the scandal of the Kwangju Massacre. Faced with censorship and a regime that denied the atrocities it had committed, Ch'oe Yun evokes in narrative form a trauma that defied narration. Today the vagaries of memory, rather than censorship, threaten to silence the history of Kwangju. May this most welcome of translations serve as a timely reminder of those events of spring 1980.
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