Reviews

A Most Ambiguous Sunday and Other Stories by Jung Young Moon

lizziet97's review against another edition

I enjoyed the first story a lot, but the next few I read were just not my style. To me, it felt like a lot of nothing- the style for each story was very similar, nothing much happened, and the characters weren’t particularly different from each other. 

ellamai's review against another edition

reflective sad medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Plot
• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? No
• Diverse cast of characters? N/A
• Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

3.0

emsemsems's review against another edition

5.0

’The horse looked rather artificial, as if it was aware of the camera and was posing. This horse looked like it was filled with resolve, yet it also appeared to be in a state of self-abandonment, enduring great difficulties. Depending on the feelings of each viewer, the horse evoked different motions. It seemed to have emerged from the white backdrop, but it also seemed as if it would disappear into the backdrop. I ultimately imagined the horse disappearing into the white background.’

More of a 4 than a 5, BUT really too many lines scattered here and there in the book were too impressive to not give this a 5. It’s one of those lines where it makes you think that no other writers could have come up with this. It’s just so uniquely Jung. If I felt inclined to give it a 4, it is only because I have not learned to appreciate some of his more obscure/experimental chunks. I found the stories with too many ‘animals’ in it a bit cryptic in meaning and made me a bit dizzy. Not sure which is my favourite yet as I’ve just finished reading the book, but I keep thinking about the one about a half-arsed burglary(?)/house invasion attempt. It’s fucked up and/but beautiful; and in my opinion, it’s surely some kind of a masterpiece.

‘She realized that learning that someone has hemorrhoids can make you feel closer to them. It was different from finding out that someone has a heart problem or diabetes or high blood pressure. In fact, you have to be very close to someone in order to confess that you have hemorrhoids.’

The above is from the story I think I like best in the collection. Even though it’s definitely not a ‘light’ story, I’d argue it’s probably the ‘lightest’ one in the collection. One that I can actually laugh freely without being pinched by the thoughts of like ‘is it fucked up that I’m laughing about this?’ as with some of Jung’s other stories. Also, reading the above made me laugh because (I like to think) that I became so close so quickly to one of my dearest friends very early on in our friendship because of her haemorrhoidectomy. It’s hard not to become close to someone when most of the conversations you have with them in the beginning of your friendship with them ends/starts with a detailed discussion of their bum.

‘Molly talked to herself from time to time. My girlfriend, in a good mood after returning from church on Sundays, would sing a song from church, and stare at Molly and say, What do you think, tell me what you think, show me that you think, too, and Molly would think for a moment and say, Crazy bitch. When she did, my girlfriend would be very happy and pat Molly on the head. My girlfriend went to church only on Sundays, and did cross-stitching when she had some free time. I kept two goldfish in a small fishbowl by the window.’

The story about the ‘tragedy’ of a couple of pet parrots is one of my favourites in the collection. I can’t get over the ‘scene’ that only lasted for a brief paragraph. How does Jung manage it? It’s like plucking the reader’s emotions like feathers of a live bird. ‘Molly’ mentioned above is one of the parrots. Jung write with such incredible intimacy about ‘nature’ – be it the weather, plants, or animals. His descriptions of them are so intensely alive, so vivid and surreal. He almost reminds me of Clarice Lispector (and she’s one of my favourite writers of all time). Or am I saying that because of how he writes about the elderly without discounting their ‘humanity’, and instead make them as real as can be – to the extent that it’s uncomfortable to read (as he brings light to their inner thoughts that would otherwise be kept unsaid for propriety’s sake). It makes the characterisation all so real, too real, it seems surreal. The following texts below are from a story in which the protagonist, an elderly man in a wheelchair recording himself with a camcorder while mindlessly indulging in countless amount of melon flavoured sweets.

‘As you might know, your mother and I didn’t love each other. Well, maybe we loved each other in the most exhausted sense of love. Yes, it was a strange relationship. Anyhow, we accidentally got to know each other and kept on seeing one another, like a habit you can’t easily abandon. While together we would treat each other in a causal and disrespectful way . . . although no serious ill-treatment occurred at all between us, I couldn’t help feeling insulted.’

‘Have I ever truly loved anyone or anything?” He shakes his head. “I was always ready not to love anyone or anything. Love was something beyond my capacity. So I’ve tried not to love anything, even a trivial thing. I thought loving somebody was the most horrible thing I could do to myself. And now I can allow myself to admit that I don’t have the ability to truly love someone, and I’m also now able to recognize the fact.’

Aside from all those compliments I have for the writer, Jung, another thing that made me really excited was the translators of the text. I’m so surprised that Jung was also involved in translating the text – in a collaborative way with one or two of them for some of his stories. I have no complaints about the translation at all, but I also don’t know if I can see a difference and/or prefer such an intimate form of literary translation. I would think that it would be more difficult to translate in this way, but this is not something I have any kind of experience in so I wouldn’t know.

‘Her lips were tasteless. And the kiss was neither good nor bad. It was such an empty experience that I wondered how it was possible for me to feel that way. And it seemed she felt the same way, too. With our lips touching we looked at each other from such a close distance that the other person’s face appeared blurry. And while we were kissing we didn’t experience anything like eternity passing. The kiss, where no tongues were extended and no excitement was shared, was so dispassionate that it didn’t provoke or reject any reaction—it was a kiss of cessation. I felt like I was kissing the trace of a kiss. I felt her shallow breathing on the tip of my nose. We realized that we couldn’t get any closer to each other, couldn’t go beyond the border created by our lips and that if we did so it would go against our deepest wishes.’

Every time I thought I’ve familiarised myself with Jung’s literary ‘patterns’ (especially) of how he makes his readers uncomfortable, I’m yet again shocked by a new paragraph that boils my bile. But it’s all so brilliantly composed that I almost don’t mind how gross it is?

The titular story did not impress/move me much, but I would love to hear/read the thoughts of someone who has a different experience to mine. Still, it still feels like it definitely deserves a spot in the collection. Something about the church and the dumpling feast being so incongruously set is mildly ‘disturbing’ in its own ways. Jung’s work/writing feels as close as ‘visual art’ can get in a ‘literary’ form (if that even makes any sense; I’m sure there are better ways to phrase this, but this is quick, half-arsed execution is all I’ve got at the moment).

‘Afterwards she came out with her face washed and then started putting on some makeup, acting as if she was all alone in the room. In the mirror he watched the woman apply her makeup. As she put on her face powder, her complexion became paler and her wrinkles disappeared. “You look like you’ve put on some weight,” he said. “Aging, no doubt,” she replied. In the mirror the woman was only looking at herself. Meanwhile, he stared at himself watching the woman in the mirror. He stared like he was trying to figure out who was who in an old photo. The woman now looked at him in the mirror. She looked like a stranger to him. The two sat there without saying anything. All the while, the woman kept yawning.’

‘At rare times, the music exerted a power over me, but usually I found music very dreary and nearly intolerable. It had gotten to the point where I could only tolerate music at rare moments. Though she also played the piano, there was little music that she could tolerate, and she believed that something about peoples’ absolute faith in music and its ability to touch the soul was excessive. She believed that, like religion, there were too many superstitions surrounding music. We both shared a certain hostility toward music.’

If I have to compare Jung to other writers I’ve read, I’d say he’s kind of like Miranda July, Tao Lin, and Hiromi Kawakami altogether. May I also add Lydia Davis and Ottessa Moshfegh? Perhaps even a bit of Bora Chung without the Chung-esque horror. I adore the playful tone in Jung’s writing that is always present regardless of what kind of plot/themes he’s using to cook up a story with. There’s a clear presence of something of the absurd in his stories which I’m so obsessed with – they has a strangely Camus-esque air to them as well.

‘Maybe K was asleep. He had severe insomnia, and sometimes, he would go without sleep for several days, then sleep for two days in a row. Perhaps what had brought the three of them together was their severe insomnia. In any case, many of the significant memories they had in common had to do with sleep.’

shesnorikkiducornet's review against another edition

2.0

I am going to chalk this one up to probably missing some sort of cultural goings-on. Other than three of these stories, I was utterly bored. My guess is that these are commentaries in one manner or other on Korean society, but without a familiarity on my end, they just end up missing the mark and coming off as empty little vignettes of abnormal life.
At the end of this book (as with the four prior entries into the Library of Korean Literature), I asked myself why the publishers would feel that this book needed to be translated and published into english. I came up empty handed.

fluffy_nerd's review against another edition

challenging dark funny lighthearted reflective relaxing slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? No
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.5

eggmama's review against another edition

3.0

Favorites:

- A Way of Remembrance
- Volume Without Weight

vcods's review against another edition

3.0

With the back cover promoting Jung as Korea's Samuel Beckett, I set out to read this book with as much enjoyment as I get from Beckett's plays. However, it took me several month to finish this book because reading it felt like pulling teeth to me.

More than being difficult to read, the introspective, self-reflective nature of the short stories kept pushing me into my own introspective thoughts and make me read while not absorbing anything. It is a strange quality in a book rather than to pull the reader in, to push them so deep in themselves they can't remember what they've just read on the page.

Out of the short stories, I can't really recommend a favorite. I kept confusing plots and characters because none of them had names and often spoke/thought in the same tone of voice. Sometimes I was convinced that some of the characters were the same from one story to another, but there were no clues confirming or denying this assumption.

I would not recommend this book as an introduction to Korean literature because it has only vestiges of 'Koreaness' in the stories. It is much more about the mental state of the Author and his characters than trying to convey Korean culture. Be that as it may, it is an interesting book, but just not well suited to me. I think if I wasn't so determined to finish it, I would have given up in the middle of a couple of the stories and skip on to the next one.

ccmontgom's review

2.0

You'd have to like "post-modern" fiction to enjoy this set of stories that intend to use semi-random collections of memories and thoughts as plots.

I'm not that guy.

If you are? Go to town.

The first story "Mrs. Brown" was most enjoyable to me and can also be purchased individually in the ASIA Publishers series of Korean fiction...

arirang's review

3.0

Strange...the vivid feelings I felt just a moment ago have vanished and now everything is ambiguous to me. I barely feel the existence of anything. And today, which hasn't even ended yet, already feels like ancient history, like some long-forgotten day from my childhood. All the days seem like Sunday, too, as if only Sunday exists,' he mumbles.

목신의 어떤 오후by 정 영문 (Jung Young-Moon) has been translated into English as "A Most Ambiguous Sunday and other stories".

"목신의 어떤 오후" is the name of one of the stories, translated into English as "Afternoon of a Faun" (from the Debussy piece), while the English title "Most Ambiguous Sunday" is taken from the final story in the collection ("더없이 어렴풋한 일요일" in the original). Normally I'm not a big fan of changing titles in translation, but the English title does better capture, in English at least, the strange mood of these stories, and is taken from the quote above.

The stories have been translated by a variety of translators, primarily Jung Yewon, and the team of Inrae You and Louis Vinciguerra. Two stories were translated by the author himself in conjunction with Sora Kim-Russell and Krys Lee, who are credited after the respective stories, but oddly not on the title page.

This is not a conventional short story collection and in particular not one with conventional characters. The dominant tones are absurd and obscure, darkly humorous, narrators who simply don't conform to the confines of the conventional world - wanderers both physically and mentally, highly introspective. The best way I can describe this is from the self-descriptions in the stories themselves:

They knew where their conversation was going. It was sure to keep getting sidetracked, with no point to it whatsoever. That was the reason, too, why it was satisfying to talk to her. Their conversations never had a point, and so they never reached any point.
...
Our friend, who had an unknowable side to him much like his father, thought of himself as an autodidact, although he wouldn't have used that term. Though he had a bit of a self-educated air about him, there wasn't much there. He continued to delve into a number of obscure topics. Once he became very interested in the wings and eyes of a certain species of fish and fowl, and read a number of books on the topic. But his interest never stayed long on one topic, and soon he followed another topic of interest. It was no surprise that even if jellyfish and moss had meant nothing to him before, once he began learning about them, they would become a large presence in his life and would dominate his thoughts. As a self-educated man his studies lacked depth and he sure wasn't opening up any new territory in the relevant field. As if an autodidact had to appear to stay under a certain level of learning, unlike a professional researcher, his interest stayed at a level which was just enough to satisfy his capricious curiosity.
...
What we enjoyed was the feeling of certain words in the rambling conversation being repeated and reiterated so that a certain rhythm was felt, and the feeling of listlessness created by that feeling.

At it's worst the stories can become a little rambling, almost random, but there is a distinct change of tone in the second half of the collection towards more focused, powerful and slightly blacker stories. My favourite was "Drifting" an almost Bernardian monologue by an elderly housebound man against his "bastard" son (in both senses of the word).

And the title story - at least in English - contains my favourite quote of the collection:

"The sky looks extremely blue today," he says. "It looks like it's scared of something. And the blue is quite dark, like the blue of a bruise."

Overall a difficult work to rate. Was it entirely successful - no - but is it something genuinely different, thought provoking and literary - certainly yes.