Book Review: A CONTRIVED WORLD by Jung Young-Moon
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A Contrived World by Jung Young Moon Trans. by Jeffrey Karvonen & Mah Eunji |
| Dalkey Archives Press, 2016 $16.00 |
Constructing A Contrived World, Korean writer and translator Jung Young Moon layers thoughtful vignettes, pulled from his narrator’s vivid imagination, to weave fiction and reality together. Set in the streets of a fictitious San Francisco, the narrator’s world projects beyond the boundaries of his reality and into the multiverse of possibilities for the people he encounters and observes. Moon’s readers follow a wandering train of thought as observation melts into digression that leads to an aside that then bleeds into a dream and spirals off either into further delusion or into some sort of symbolic lesson from the narrator.
Exploring the streets of Moon’s fictional city, the narrator reflects that “San Francisco seems a decent place for the deranged” and wonders if that’s not why he’s there:
Sometimes I think about the possibility of losing my mind. Of course, no amount of effort might be sufficient to attain derangement, and derangement might not be attained by effort alone. Nothing seems to be keeping me from becoming deranged, considering that I have always lived in a world of distorted reality, that I’m often trapped in uncontrollable emotions from which I cannot easily escape or absorbed in my ideas (especially nonsensical or morbid ideas, because thinking only seems meaningful when excessive), that I seek refuge in those ideas, that I’m writing a novel that reeks of a deranged person’s memoir, and that I sometimes talk to myself.
The collision of the narrator’s feverish rambling and chilling realizations leave him in a constant fog. Fog, in its own right, is almost always present in the novel. Always looming, always creeping in slowly and seductively to draw in its victim, a disorienting daze manifests itself as an alcoholic haze or drowsy reverie—and, of course, as the ever-present mist that lurks in San Francisco’s atmosphere. The narrator repeatedly falls into a poet’s laze, pondering life and language as if in a Parisian salon. But so often, this behavior leads him to depression, isolation and suicidal thought.
A Contrived World exists at the corner of J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan and a sociological study of The Sims. Moon successfully deconstructs the creative process by crafting characters to watch and follow within the confines of an imagined life. The narrator’s recurrent encounters with bridges, alcohol and suicide seemingly allude to Kerouac’s Jack Duluoz in Big Sur. The text is smart and savvy—and absolutely worth a second read.
Originally published in 2011 in Jung Young Moon’s native Korean, A Contrived World was published in English for the first time in 2016 by Dalkey Archive Press. For their work, translators Mah Eunji and Jeffrey Karvonen received two grants from the Literature Translation Institute of Korean and a grant from the Daesan Cultural Foundation. Fortunately, Eunji and Karvonen had the patience and the insight to beautifully reconstruct Moon’s dreamlike novel for his English readers. I hope there is more to come from the author and his translators.