PositiveArt ReviewA series of nightmares is one way to describe Bora Chung’s cursed tales ... Other stories read like a series of cautionary tales against capitalist greed ... What follows is an unfolding of further gruesome events that lead to murder, cannibalism and incest. What do you call a nightmare you can’t wake up from? A living hell?
Elisa Shua Dusapin, tr. Aneesa Abbas Higgins
RaveArtReviewDusapin’s first-person narrative is formed of crystalline sentences that favour lucid imagery to describe themes of loneliness, familial obligation, identity (the protagonist’s mother is a Korean fishmonger, but she doesn’t know her European father), societal pressures and sexuality. And while all this seems to lie just beneath the same layer of ice that keeps the town frozen over the winter, Dusapin has a knack for thawing the narrative with moments of intimate tension between the protagonist and Kerrand, or with more intensely corporal descriptions ... Throughout the novel there is a melancholic sense that, like footprints in the snow, the relationship between the protagonist and Kerrand is on the brink of melting away. And it’s only at the very end, at the brittle edges of this love story, that the characters break apart from each other. It’s also in this act that they finally find themselves coming into form.
