Kim Hong’s new novel collection ‘Don’t Cry Here’
The characters in Kim Hong (38)’s new short story collection “Don’t Cry Here” (Munhakdongne) are masters of transformation. They all change into non-human objects, such as baseballs, Buddhist statues, and Galaxy phones. Even if they were visualized, it would be difficult to go beyond what one imagined while reading the book. In a telephone interview with the Dong-A Ilbo on the 16th, Kim Hong said, “I think that the job of novels these days is to show imagination that cannot be expressed through visuals.”
The title of the new work, ‘Don’t Cry Here’, is a fantasy about Sanhae, an energetic bakery worker with the MBTI type ESFP, who becomes the light. Sanhae firmly believes the bakery owner’s promise that he will raise his salary the more he works. His brightness is expressed in lux, a unit of illuminance. When his brightness, which started at 3,000 lux, exceeds 25,000 lux, the owner fires him instead of keeping his promise. However, the American nuclear fusion research lab covets his enormous light source.
Even though I was laughing at the outrageous setting, I suddenly felt bitter. It made me think about the weight of emotional labor that requires me to always have a bright expression. As the author says, “I try to put a spoonful of sadness in every novel,” there are painful satires of reality hidden throughout the novel disguised as comedy. I thought it would be a healing story that would pat me on the back because the title was “Don’t Cry Here,” but it’s a black comedy with a twist.
Where do these bizarre ideas come from? Whenever an idea comes to him, he often writes it down on a mobile phone app. Then, he connects seemingly unrelated stories to create a new narrative. He explained, “Just as stars may seem to be separate, but when you give them meaning, they become deer or bears, I put as many stars as possible and make them into constellations.”
Where does his imagination end? The novel eventually goes so far as to say that the Korea Baseball Organization (KBO) defrauded the people and professional baseball disappeared from Korea. It has the power to make you read, “Let’s see how far it goes.” He says his next work is also a story about a human who has turned into an object. “I want to go all the way to the limit of the story allowed in a novel.”
Reporter Kim So-min [email protected]
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2024-08-19 00:34:54