3 minute read
CURSED BUNNY by Bora Chung; trans. by Anton Hur
27-year-old protagonist of Romanian novelist Cărtărescu’s waking-dream book is a teacher who has a decidedly Dostoyevskian discontentment with the world: He wanted to be a writer, but one particularly sharp-tongued critic, calling a poem of his “a pointless whirlpool of words,” stopped his literary career in its tracks. Now, at the beginning of the novel, he finds himself battling the lice that are epidemic among his students. Parasites are much on his mind throughout this sprawling narrative. So, too, is death a constant preoccupation: Why should he, why should anyone, accumulate knowledge and experience only, in the end, to be annihilated? When not pondering the eternal void, the young man is suspended in a kind of nightly dream state courtesy of the titular solenoid that the previous owner of his house, a protégé of Nikola Tesla’s who spent a long career inventing very strange things, not least of them this particular electromagnetic contraption, left behind, thanks to which, our narrator says, “I always slept aloft, floating between the bed and ceiling, occasionally turning over like a swimmer in a lazy, glittering light.” It’s not the only solenoid hidden away in the back alleys and tunnels of Bucharest, and one day the city itself will float away. Before then, however, our teacher and his girlfriend, a physics teacher smitten by theosophy, are drawn into the occult world of a group called the Picketists, condemned by the regime but capable of all kinds of mischief, whose members include a surprising number of people who figure in what passes for our teacher’s ordinary life. Cărtărescu writes poetically and philosophically (“What visceral and metaphysical mechanism converts the objective into the subjective?”), and while the story doesn’t always add up, it’s full of arresting images and eldritch twists that would do Umberto Eco proud.
A masterwork of Kafkaesque strangeness, brilliantly conceived and written.
CURSED BUNNY
Chung, Bora Trans. by Anton Hur Algonquin (256 pp.) $17.99 paper | Dec. 6, 2022 978-1-64375-360-7
Dark and visceral tales shortlisted for the International Booker Prize. If the first story of a collection is meant to set the tone for the whole volume, then “The Head,” the opener to South Korean author Chung’s first work to be translated into English, is a doozy. A young woman is beset by a talking head in her toilet, made from, as the head tells the woman, “the things you dumped down the toilet, like your fallen-out hair and feces and toilet paper you used to wipe your behind.” No matter how the woman tries to silence or destroy the head, it grows and disrupts her life through courtship, marriage, and the birth of her daughter. If it seems surprising that an institution like the Booker Prize would go for gross-out body horror, one need only consider the deft social commentary that underpins Chung’s tales. In “The Embodiment,” for example, a single woman ends up pregnant from taking too much birth control medication and then is warned by her obstetrician that if she doesn’t find a father for her unborn child, the consequences could be dire. (Spoiler: They are.) Women’s bodies are literally disfigured by social expectations or cultural pressures; children are destroyed by the cruel whims of adults. Money, old age, technology, and intergenerational trauma ruin plenty of things here, too. In the title story, the family business—the making of cursed fetish objects—is passed down through the generations, with one particularly disastrous rabbit lamp wreaking havoc on its greedy recipient. Whether borrowing from fable, folktale, speculative fiction, science fiction, or horror, Chung’s stories corkscrew toward devastating conclusions—bleak, yes, but also wise and honest about the nightmares of contemporary life.
