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Contradictions
YANG Gui-ja
Translated by Stephen EPSTEIN and KIM Mi-Young
No. 126, 2005 , 190 pages. ISBN-13: 978-1-885445-26-1 (ISBN-10:1-885445-26-1 blue -) paperback $22.50, ISBN-13: 978-1-885445-36-0 (ISBN-10: 1-885445-36-9 beige -) hardcover $48.50
(receive publisher-direct discount at checkout)
YANG Gui-ja is one of Korea’s major literary figures of the last generation, with a succession of literary prizes and best-sellers to her credit. Her most representative early work, the 1987 Wonmi-dong saramdeul, is available in English as A Distant and Beautiful Place. In the 1990s her writing took an increasingly personal turn with a series of popular works including Contradictions (Mosun), South Korea’s best-selling novel in 1998.
Contradictions is a coming-of-age tale that explores the paradoxes and contradictions of the human condition and delves into the meaning of personal happiness. The book opens with a moment of epiphany as the main character An Jin-jin awakens to the realization that her entire energy must be devoted to her own life. She struggles over whom to marry with an awareness of consequences gleaned from seeing the divergence in the lives of twin sisters—her mother and her aunt. A host of binary oppositions is also presented in the lives of the men around her: a wannabe gang boss brother, an Ivy League cousin, an alcoholic schizophrenic father, a steadfast but rigid uncle, and her two suitors. Yang skillfully develops these characters in increasingly complex threads as the novel unfolds in a series of surprises.
"For anyone with an interest in Korean life, this newly translated bestseller is a delight. . . . With the creation of main character Jin-jin, Ms. Yang threw off the burden of having to tackle Korea’s great political issues, like democracy and postwar trauma, and settled down to telling the personal story of a young Korean woman." —Far Eastern Economic Review
"This volume is worthy of the highest praise." —New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies
Stephen Epstein is Director of the Asian Studies Institute at the Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand. His research focuses on contemporary literature and society, and he has translated several pieces of Korean and Indonesian fiction, including the winner of the 1990 Korea Times translation contest in the short story category. E-mail: Stephen.Epstein@vuw.ac.nz
Kim Mi-Young is currently teaching Korean and pursuing a master's degree in Applied Linguistics at Victoria University. In addition to Contradictions, she has translated short stories by award-winning authors Park Wan-suh and Kim In-suk.
Cover design by Richard Hahn, e-mail: lumakick@gmail.com
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