The Private Life of Plants

by Lee Seung-u, Inrae You Vinciguerra (Translator), Louis Vinciguerra (Translator)

Overview

The Private Life of Plants is about the ways in which desire can both worsen and mitigate our flaws. We meet amputee sons whose mothers cart them from brothel to brothel; we meet brothers who love their brother's lovers, and whose lovers in turn are stolen away by the husbands of their sisters. Sexuality in all its ugliness and wonder is put under the microscope by Lee Seung-U, who reminds us that love may come in various forms, but that it is, nonetheless, a force that unifies us all . . . whether we like it or not.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781628971163
Publisher:	Deep Vellum Publishing
Publication date:	12/18/2015
Series:	Library of Korean Literature Series
Pages:	133
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.50(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Lee Seung-U was born in 1959. He is a professor of Korean Literature at Chosun University. His novel The Reverse Side of Life was a finalist for the Prix Femina in 2002, and is available in English translation. J. M. Clezio, the 2008 Nobel Laureate for Literature, has remarked that Lee is Korea's strongest candidate for the Nobel Prize.

The translator, teacher, and artist Inrae You Vinciguerra has, along with her husband, translated four Korean novels into English. Exhibitions of her artwork have taken place in California, Korea, and China.

Louis Vinciguerra is an artist, teacher, and playwright. His stage biography of the German Nobel Prize winner Hermann Hesse, The Magic Spiral (HH:77), was performed at the 1978 Hesse Centennial Exhibition in West Berlin, Germany.

Interviews

"'All trees are incarnations of frustrated love.' So avers this beguiling novel by the writer whom J.M. Clezio has called Korea’s most likely Nobel Prize contender....Almost certainly the oddest love story you’ll have read in a long time. Think of Murakami drifting into the lands of Borges and Kafka, and you’ll have some of the feel of this strange, enchanting tale." -Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review)

Editorial Reviews

"Lee has created a fantastical, mythical love story. His romantic images stand as challenges to both tragedy and nihilism... An Asian Romeo and Juliet, a great novel that revives the mythical dimension of love by its rich and powerful images" --Le Figaro

Dalkey Archive Press

From the Publisher

★ 2015-09-24
"All trees are incarnations of frustrated love." So avers this beguiling novel by the writer whom J.M. Clezio has called Korea's most likely Nobel Prize contender. Ki-hyeon is a lascivious and shallow young man. As Lee's story opens, with a somewhat fusty term, he is negotiating with a "lady of the night," one of his conditions being that she remove her makeup. He approves of her "voluptuous breasts," and then again of her "voluptuous body and gigantic breasts," and then—well, it doesn't matter, because he is not procuring the hooker for himself but instead for his brother Woo-hyeon, having taken over that duty from his mother. Say what? Yes, said brother has lost both legs in a military accident and, with them, much of his will to live, though when a bright young singer named Soon-mee enters the picture, the brother, glad to be done with sex for hire, perks up. Soon enough, he and Soon-mee are addressing each other in gigglingly mythical terms, he calling her his "nymph" and she calling him her "beast." Ki-hyeon falls in love with Soon-mee himself, though there's a tangle with a brutal brother-in-law to sort out. If you're confused, only a bit into the book, there are more conundrums to come. Some are served up by a taciturn father who doesn't have much to say about human affairs but insists that plants are more worthy of love than most people—which may explain why Woo-hyeon winds up, in a dreamlike conclusion, borrowing a page from the Greek myth of Apollo and Daphne, "pray[ing] to be transformed into a tree." But who is Apollo in the tale? Try to diagram the plot, and you might give yourself whiplash; at the very least, you're likely to feel a little unmoored as the real world, such as it is, slips away into myth and dream. Almost certainly the oddest love story you'll have read in a long time. Think of Murakami drifting into the lands of Borges and Kafka, and you'll have some of the feel of this strange, enchanting tale.

Kirkus Reviews