The first collaboration between Pyun and translator Kim-Russell, The Hole, introduced one of Korea’s most lauded writers to Anglophone readers. Kim-Russell’s ability to replicate Pyun’s stifling terror repeats here as he presents a nameless antihero, known only as 'the man.' ... A slap-in-the-face parable of the perils of society’s failures, Pyun’s suffocating tale reveals a future all too possible and real.
I enjoy books that live between categories, the platypuses of the bookstore, and City of Ash and Red is that type of book. Classified as a thriller, it could also appeal to literary readers or speculative fiction fans. Whatever shelf you want to put it on, it's an anxious nightmare of a novel ... Much will be made by critics about the themes of immigration, alienation and communication inherent in the book — but in simple terms imagine if, after a Duolingo course, you ended up in Mad Max's hood and there's rats and you lost your passport. It's a bad situation, and at first you'll feel sorry for the protagonist. But the more you get to know him, the more you'll hate him ... It's a good book and it's a nasty one. Due to its platypus status, though, it might be easy for potential audiences to miss, with speculative readers thinking it's too smarty-pants because literature in translation always has that aura of caviar, and literary readers imagining that dystopian books are trashy. But whether you want to believe this is a grim look at the human condition or an exciting bit of weird fiction, it's worth a read.
The extent to which award-winning Korean novelist Hye-Young Pyun’s City of Ash and Red is science fictional is entirely debatable. You can read it as science fiction, perhaps. But it’s a very literary sort of science fiction ... I disliked it intensely ... The reason I didn’t realise this at the beginning was because I was reading it through the lens of speculative fiction: I was waiting for the SFnal reveal, or the extra-human layer of horror. Neither of which ever came, and I gradually came to understand it never would. Instead, this is a novel in which we slowly discover that the main character—who initially comes across as hapless, victimised, lost and out of his element—is, in fact, a really shitty human. That’s… pretty much it. An examination of human anomie and the banality of evil, really. I don’t find the banality of evil all that exciting.
This disturbing, Kafkaesque tale from Pyun charts the career of an unnamed man from an unnamed country, who has been 'a product developer at a pest control firm' that specializes in rats—a Sisyphean task, given that many rodents survive any efforts at eradication ... The parallels between the man’s new life and the lives of rats are a bit heavy-handed, and once Pyun reveals that the man has committed marital rape, some readers will lose interest in his fate. Still, those with a taste for creepy suspense will be rewarded.
An unnamed man in an unidentified time frame is sent to Country C to work a high-level extermination job. He immediately finds that his new home is barely survivable: The street is overrun with vermin and garbage, stink pervades the air, his job is suddenly postponed, and his only suitcase is stolen as soon as he hits town. He receives no explanation, and nobody there or at home is looking out for his welfare. Meanwhile, the city’s been overtaken by a deadly virus, about which nobody seems to know the exact causes or symptoms. Then things really start to go wrong ... As a story of one man's struggle to maintain sanity against the odds, it's both consistently gripping and consistently bleak.
