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Your Utopia

von
Chung, BoraHur, AntonÜbersetzung
E-BookEPUBePub WasserzeichenE-Book
240 Seiten
Englisch
Honford Starerschienen am13.02.2024
By the internationally acclaimed author of Cursed Bunny, in another thrilling translation from the Korean by Anton Hur, Your Utopia is full of tales of loss and discovery, idealism and dystopia, death and immortality. 'Nothing concentrates the mind like Chung's terrors, which will shrivel you to a bouillon cube of your most primal instincts' (Vulture), yet these stories are suffused with Chung's inimitable wry humor and surprisingly tender moments, too-often between unexpected subjects. Chung's writing is 'haunting, funny, gross, terrifying-and yet when we reach the end, we just want more' (Alexander Chee). If you haven't yet experienced the fruits of this singular imagination, Your Utopia is waiting.

Bora Chung has written three novels and four collections of short stories. She has an MA in Russian and East European area studies from Yale University and a PhD in Slavic literature from Indiana University. She translates modern literary works from Russian and Polish into Korean and writes generally unrealistic stories. Among her works, Cursed Bunny, a collection of short stories, was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2022. She is currently the president of the Science Fiction Writers Union of Korea.mehr
Verfügbare Formate
TaschenbuchKartoniert, Paperback
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Produkt

KlappentextBy the internationally acclaimed author of Cursed Bunny, in another thrilling translation from the Korean by Anton Hur, Your Utopia is full of tales of loss and discovery, idealism and dystopia, death and immortality. 'Nothing concentrates the mind like Chung's terrors, which will shrivel you to a bouillon cube of your most primal instincts' (Vulture), yet these stories are suffused with Chung's inimitable wry humor and surprisingly tender moments, too-often between unexpected subjects. Chung's writing is 'haunting, funny, gross, terrifying-and yet when we reach the end, we just want more' (Alexander Chee). If you haven't yet experienced the fruits of this singular imagination, Your Utopia is waiting.

Bora Chung has written three novels and four collections of short stories. She has an MA in Russian and East European area studies from Yale University and a PhD in Slavic literature from Indiana University. She translates modern literary works from Russian and Polish into Korean and writes generally unrealistic stories. Among her works, Cursed Bunny, a collection of short stories, was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2022. She is currently the president of the Science Fiction Writers Union of Korea.
Details
Weitere ISBN/GTIN9781915829023
ProduktartE-Book
EinbandartE-Book
FormatEPUB
Format HinweisePub Wasserzeichen
FormatE101
Erscheinungsjahr2024
Erscheinungsdatum13.02.2024
Seiten240 Seiten
SpracheEnglisch
Dateigrösse759 Kbytes
Artikel-Nr.13854799
Rubriken
Genre9201

Inhalt/Kritik

Leseprobe



The Center for Immortality Research


You know, I think I m being stalked?

That s what an unni at the Center confided to me two months ago, right in the middle of preparations for our anniversary event. Apparently, some man had called up the Center saying he was such-and-such and had come from the same region as my work unni and they were extremely close friends and he was running for the National Assembly and he would like to know the unni s phone number. Of course, our receptionist had immediately picked up on the fact that calling oneself extremely close friends with someone was extremely suspicious in itself, but when the mention of his political ambitions was followed by a presentation of his clearly fraudulent campaign promises, she cut him off, saying the unni was not at her desk right now and, furthermore, she was hardly in a position to hand out personal information such as phone numbers to strangers. Still, as a common courtesy, she had asked if he had any messages. This led to his I ll call again later follow-up calls, which made all other work almost impossible for the receptionist. Well, not that the Center had all that much work to be made impossible, normally, and this was the reception desk at that, but it was a very busy time. Everyone was frantic with the anniversary event, and how annoying that these calls, that could ve been made during any of the vast expanses of emptiness in our calendars, were instead being foisted on us during this inopportune epoch.

If you were to ask what the Center for Immortality Research does, we do exactly what it says on the label: research immortality. In 1912, not long after Korea was forcibly annexed by Japan, the Center opened with the hopelessly silly slogan of Our Country May Fall but We Shall Live Forever, and it was now the ninety-eighth year of its founding, which occasioned a huge blowout party. I still have no idea why we settled on ninety-eight for such an occasion instead of ninety or ninety-five or one hundred, but none of my older sunbaes at the Center know either, nor do the Center s board members no doubt. I mean, whatever, I m at the bottom of the hierarchy in this establishment, and it s my job to do the work they give me, and if the work involves an anniversary party in a random year, that s what I ve got to do.

I may be at the bottom of the hierarchy, but my title happens to be gwajang- middle manager -which of course is also part of a long chain of fluffed-up titles going right to the top. The board members are at the highest echelons, with a slew of bujangs and chajangs and other titles going down, and I m the lowest-ranking, with not a single sawon below me, to say nothing of a daeli. Why, despite our designation as a research lab, we have such corporate titles instead of primary investigator or some such is also beyond me.

I mean, that s all well and good, especially when I get my monthly salary, but the problem is that because there are no sawons, all the tiny little chores that a sawon would do simply fall to me. And among the silly little chores I was given was to somehow get Movie Star B to come to our anniversary event.

Who was Movie Star B? He was in fact quite handsome and a good actor and had won some award and his name was well known; what did he have to do with our Center and its ninety-eighth anniversary? Well, nothing, except for the fact that a long time ago, before he became a big star, he had been in a fantasy movie that had to do with immortality. A movie that bombed so spectacularly that people these days hardly remembered its title, and the actors in it probably wanted to erase it from their CVs, but in any case, it was a movie about immortality, and the event would be filled with doctors and professors and fancy academics, which is why they thought having a movie star in the mix would make the atmosphere less rigid and the Center would look more glamorous, as it were, hence we decided to bring in Mr. B.

A good idea, but as all such planning goes, there was no way it was going to pass a board vote, and since all the bujangs and chajangs of the lab were experts in immortality in their own ways, there had to be a battle of what constitutes immortality as a concept before we moved forward. The Korean word for immortality is a combination of long youth and forever life, and did long and forever really mean the same thing? Of course not, because forever lasted a lot longer than long. Therefore, long youth was tawdry compared to forever life, and for the actor to have starred in a movie about long youth was, according to detractors, not a good fit to the Center s mission. But when we then looked for movies dealing with the strictest sense of forever life, there were almost no such films in Korea, and it would be absurd to think an actor like Hugh Jackman would bother to come to a Center for Immortality Research s ninety-eighth anniversary celebration event in Korea (there was also some debate as to whether the movie Hugh Jackman had starred in, The Fountain, was a movie about immortality or reincarnation, or whether it might actually have been about parallel universes, but when we decided to watch the film as a group in order to determine this issue, the board members all began to snore fifteen minutes into the film, making the whole point moot). Then, as an alternative, there was a Russian film trilogy that was extremely successful at the box office and won some impossible-to-pronounce award, but there was no one at the Center who could speak Russian and therefore this suggestion was also rejected.

And so, it came down to the actor Mr. B. When not a chajang or a bujang, or not even a board member, but the sojang himself suddenly called me, I ran to his office with my heart pounding; he handed me a Post-it with an email address and phone number scribbled on it and said such a famous movie star would probably have a busy schedule so I needed to call him early and nail him down, and that his assistant had already called them once and got a We will look into the matter, and that this was the actor s manager s phone number and I needed to call them and get a sure answer, and he then proceeded to give me an exact script of what I was to say over the phone. I was to say I was the gwajang of a large pharmaceutical company and how we would appreciate it if you would grace our ninety-eighth anniversary celebrations with your presence, to be polite but firm, and to emphasize how we were a major pharmaceutical company and that I was a gwajang. And that they d understand they were being treated with a certain respect if they understood a gwajang was calling them, and also if I mentioned we were a big pharmaceutical company, they might think we would eventually offer him a commercial, which would make them hesitate to refuse the offer.

Of course, we were not a pharmaceutical company, but a research center attached to one, and we didn t do commercials, but in any case, this was the task I was given and I did it to the best of my abilities and it resulted in a complete and utter stonewalling from B s manager.

I made thirty-eight calls and sent twenty-two text messages and even fifteen really polite emails, but there was no answer, which made me anxious at first and then angry and, finally, resigned to the fact. Even if I was the lowest-ranking person and there was no possibility of moving up in this organization until the end of time, I had managed to hold on to this job all these years and it just riled me that I was suddenly faced with an obstacle that had nothing to do with my office work or research, but something as silly as a manager refusing to take my calls, it was all just incredibly unfair.

As I sat in the Center lobby, fiddling with my phone and wondering if I should try again, suddenly I heard a voice.

Excuse me, you don t happen to know where Kim Segyeong bujang s office is?

The man was very polite and his tone very calm, and when I looked up and met his gaze I had a feeling I had seen his face somewhere before, but I couldn t quite put my finger on it.

Do you know what floor Kim Segyeong s office is? I am a childhood friend of hers, Park Hyukseh, I m running for the National Assembly â¦

That s when I thought, Oh, it s the stalker, words that almost left my mouth, but I stopped myself. Whereupon I frantically rummaged through my mind to find something else to say but came up completely empty. And since I simply stared at him, the man spoke again.

I was very close with Kim Segyeong bujang since we were children and grew up in the same place, and I do have some connection with the Center. As a candidate for the National Assembly, I am working day and night for the betterment of my country and fellow countrymen. If you pick me as your National Assembly member, I will make everyone in our country live forever, and that would make the Center for Immortality Research the foremost research center in the land â¦

Make everyone in the country immortal? I ve heard all...

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Autor

Bora Chung has written three novels and four collections of short stories. She has an MA in Russian and East European area studies from Yale University and a PhD in Slavic literature from Indiana University. She translates modern literary works from Russian and Polish into Korean and writes generally unrealistic stories. Among her works, Cursed Bunny, a collection of short stories, was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2022. She is currently the president of the Science Fiction Writers Union of Korea.