Love of Yeosu

Description

2024 Nobel Prize in Literature Winner Han Kang

Living as a human being in this world until the end,
About that miraculous event

A classic of Han River literature reborn
On the road, tie a knot quietly

A deep line drawn by connecting three dots

Reading the Han River of yesterday that made the Han River of today. This is a revised edition of all the short story collections (total of three volumes) published by Han Kang to date, who began her literary career by publishing the poem “Winter of Seoul” and four other pieces in the winter issue of the quarterly Literature and Society in 1993 and winning the short story “Red Anchor” in the Seoul Shinmun New Year’s literary contest the following year. Han Kang, winner of the Korean Novel Literature Award (4), Today's Young Artist Award (1999), Yi Sang Literary Award (2000), Dongni Literature Award (2005), Manhae Literature Award (2010), Hwang Sun-won Literature Award (2014), International Booker Prize (2015), Malaparte Literature Award (2016), Kim Yu-jeong Literature Award (2017), San Clemente Literature Award (2018), Daesan Literature Award (2019), Médicis Prize for Foreign Literature (2022), Émile Guimet Prize for Asian Literature (2023), Nobel Prize in Literature (2024), and more, resonates with our times as she examines the loneliness and pain at the root of life through her solid and delicate sentences.
The first Korean Nobel Prize winner in Literature, Han Kang, has published three short story collections so far. The three books, which contain works written over a period of 1995 years from 2012 to 17, were given a new look in 2018. It was an exercise in carefully connecting the three books, each with different colors and formats, and placing them on a single line. Han Kang’s first short story collection and her first book overall, Love of Yeosu, was published in 1, a collection of short stories that the author had written in a flurry for a year when she was 1995 or 5 years old. In her second short story collection, Fruit of My Woman, published five years later, Han Kang seems to have encountered “the simple truth that the process of changing like flowing water is me,” but soon asks again, “Who wrote each of these short stories?” (“Author’s Note”) And 12 years later, she published her third short story collection, Yellow Patterned Eternity. In the meantime, the full-length novels “Your Cold Hands,” “The Vegetarian,” “The Wind Blows, Go Away,” and “Greek Hour” were written.

The short story has something like a match spark.
First, pull the fire and watch with all your might until it goes out.
Those moments pushed me forward with all my might.
-'Author's Note' (2012), 『Yellow-patterned Eternity』

You can find the trajectory only by looking back. There are things that have changed and things that have not changed in Han Kang’s short stories while the three volumes of the collection of short stories were published. In “Love of Yeosu,” the lonely and isolated beings who desperately express their longing for humans and the world, and who leave, abandon, wander, and fall, are hurt and misaligned as they awkwardly try to accept the world and each other that they so desperately longed for in “The Fruit of My Woman.” And in “Yellow Patterned Eternity,” the vitality burns even stronger in the will for regeneration and despair. The dignified beings still suffer, but they finally try to embrace the other person. The place where they must eventually return, the leaves pushing up the veins, the flowers blooming in the recovery period, the natural changes and flow that they tried to capture during the “connecting the dots” work are in harmony with the work of photographer Lee Jeong-jin used on the cover.
On the other hand, isn't it Han Kang's fierce question that remains constant? 'I want to live, I have to live, how should I live?' He never lets go of the question, and asks about the existence of humans, life and death, and this world throughout twenty-one novels, but inevitably cannot reach the answer. However, the question itself, like a pale flame, the heat of loneliness and delicate sadness derived from the question, becomes the power that draws them in the work and loves and keeps us alive. It has changed but has not changed, so I carefully changed the arrangement of the novels and touched up some expressions, but I left what needed to be left as is.
In response to the author’s own question in “The Fruit of My Woman”, which asked “who” earlier, I will continue with the newly written author’s words in “Yellow Patterned Eternity.” I recommend that we retrace the trajectory together. Someone has been writing alone for over twenty years. The Han River is still walking.

I know. The twelve years I spent writing these novels will never come back, and I will never meet the vivid me who wrote all these sentences again. I don’t think that should be felt as a loss. This should never be a farewell, because I am someone who wants to continue writing and living.
-'Author's Note' (2018), 『Yellow-patterned Eternity』

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A delicate examination of the essential loneliness and hardship of life.
The author's first book depicting the loss and wandering of existence
『Love of Yeosu』

This is the author's first book and first collection of short stories published in 1995. Through revision work, the arrangement of the novels was changed and some expressions were refined. "Love in Yeosu" delicately examines the essential loneliness and hardship of life and depicts the loss and wandering of existence.
The traces of a man who was abandoned at Seoul Station on a train from Yeosu and a father who lost his wife and attempted suicide with his younger brother ("Love in Yeosu"), In-gyu who witnessed his younger brother's death ("Running"), Dong-geol who has to live with his twin brother who has become a vegetable ("Night Train"), Jeong-hwan who ran away from his hometown after abandoning his idiot younger sister ("Azalea Ridge"), and Yeong-jin and In-sook who abandoned their home and hometown and wander like orphans, trying to find themselves ("Carnival of Darkness"). Yeosu is the name of the sorrowful hearts of those who are wounded and sick somewhere and finally arrive. In seven short stories that contain serious views on fate and death, lonely and isolated characters leave, abandon, wander, and fall. The beings who awaken the livingness of existence near death and do not stop longing for people and the world leave a cold and hot aftertaste.

The reason why I am certain that 『Love in Yeosu』 will survive the ravages of time without losing its light is because the opposite of life is death, and life next to death is a burden of the inevitable loss of love, and wounds are the most fearful enemy and obstacle because they force a ‘rebirth’ that accompanies death, but at the same time, it leads us to reflect on the fact that the value of such ‘rebirth’ is the power that allows humans to live as ‘humans’ at a profound and profound level of the spirit. _Kang Gye-sook (literary critic)