"Reading “Vaseline Buddha” feels like watching a magician who explains his trick as he performs it and yet still mesmerizes you with his sleight of hand. You simultaneously enter the dream and wake from it...This resistance underpinning the entire exercise makes Jung an heir to Polish novelist Witold Gombrowicz, who understood that writing is the documentation of a dance the writer does between form and chaos." — Tyler Malone, Los Angeles Time
"The novel raises questions about story, and how stories are created. It muses on where thoughts come from, how they act on us, and how to live a life that doesn’t take itself too seriously, while still earnestly engaging with the world. Jung’s work is as a hybrid of fiction, journal, and philosophical aphorisms. It begins in a place where meaning is of little concern, and ends by asking the reader to build up her own meaning while enjoying Jung’s fragments for the small, precious pleasures they provide." — John W. W. Zeiser, Los Angeles Review of Books
"We wade into these... streams of consciousness and are swept away in a current of fluid thought, as sensation and ideation merge into a movement of molecules, a tide in perpetual flux." — Tyler Malone, Literary Hub
"A remarkable work for its eccentric modes of thought and how it looks beyond the basic novel form and asks important secondary questions of where fiction is left to go.” — Jason DeYoung, Review31 (a "Best Novels of 2016" selection)
"By continuing to reject the instinct for the order of things, the novel seeks to shed darkness on glimpses of the void. In those intense moments of deconstruction, the nothing that the language cannot express can be felt briefly in a moment of silent understanding amid cascade of words." — Jack Saebyok Jung, Quarterly Conversation
"The book echoes the hectic nature of life itself, how chaotic and challenging it can be at times… certainly not a conventional novel, but it is one that challenges and enriches any reader who takes the time to follow Jung Young Moon as he contemplates the world around him.” — Louisa Lee, Inspire Me Korea
"Jung Young Moon’s work is remarkable for its eccentric modes of thought and how it tests the limits of the novel and our notions of what fiction can do. It looks beyond the basic form and asks important secondary questions of where fiction is left to go. It also reveals crisply the cryptic nature of everyday life, which if examined with deep seriousness, will inevitably lead to deep absurdity—and that makes its futility somewhat pleasing." — Jason De Young, Numero Cinq Magazine
"The book plays directly to the central questions of the act of writing: Should writing be driven by order or chaos? Should it structure the universe or reflect its seeming randomness? Is the imposition of form a virtue of a vice? On that front, it feels akin to writers like Gombrowicz and Beckett." — Tyler Malone, contributing editor for Lit Hub and founding editor of The Scofield (Literary Hub's 21 Books to Read in July 2016)
"Surreal landscapes, automatic writing, and Kafka comparisons? Our interest is piqued by this book, yes indeed." — Vol. 1 Brooklyn (July 2016 Books Preview)
"A strange and wonderful novel. First and foremost, it is a page-turner, but in a way entirely different from what the phrase 'page-turner' usually evokes...page after page, you’ll find yourself smiling, if not laughing out loud, at the comic absurdity that occupies the narrator’s mind and writing." — Kalau Almony, Reading in Translation
"The circularity of his writing, and his repeated efforts to create a story, are, we begin to realise, themselves a form of therapy—an attempt to work through unexpressed suffering." — Tony Malone, Asymptote
“Jung… offers an audacious discourse on creativity, presenting readers with a labyrinth of ideas, images, suggestions, and observations all waiting and available to individual interpretation.” — Library Journal
"I have no...idea what this book is going to be like but I know it has piqued my curiosity. Jung Young Moon has been compared to Kafka and Beckett and I’m into that. Jason DeYoung described the book as “meditative, challenging, narratively haywire and comic”, and I’m into that, too. Modern Korean literature? Sure, into that, too. And I kind of want to know what a Vaseline Buddha is, so I’m gonna pick it up ASAP." — Susie Rodarme, BookRiot, "8 Small Press Books to Read in July"
Included inWords Without Borders'"July 2016 Watchlist"
"One of South Korea's more eccentric contemporary writers, Jung could almost be described as a cross between Beckett and Brautigan – his earlier writing was often extremely dark, but recently the balance has tipped towards lightness, of touch as much as of mood. It's all part of an aesthetic which prizes vagueness, randomness, digression rather than progression." — Deborah Smith, Verso Books (Recommended as part of Verso's Five-Book Plan)
"A quite nicely wending stream, of consciousness and more..." — Michael Orthofer, The Complete Review
"If you want something vastly different to anything else currently out there, I strongly recommend Vaseline Buddha . . . Vaseline Buddha may be a weird novel, but it leaves you thinking in ways you might not have considered before." — The Sleepless Editor
"One achieves a kind of serenity when we delve into this book. I find that eccentrics like Jung are needed in literature." — Achim Stanislawski
"Truly meaningful literature. What makes this novel so fascinating is its permanent liminality and ambiguity: it is exactly the completely obvious which remains ultimately cryptic; it is exactly the linguistic hyper-precision which leads to confusion; it is exactly the “boring” stuff which becomes thrilling at another level; and it is exactly the humorous, ironic attitude of the author-narrator which proves his deep seriousness." — Jan Dirks
“At its heart, Vaseline Buddha is a game of ideas, used to obviate the difficulty of expressing the difficulty of life...Jung removes the trappings of the ordinary novel to create something new, molding out of the gray matter of the mind a recognizable form.”— L.S Popvich Blog
“Reality and fantasy, memories and dreams, Asia and Europe, all are equal partners in this literary meditation” —Christoph Hartner, Crown Newspaper (Germany)
09/15/2016
As narratives go, little happens in Jung's latest translated-into-English title: unable to sleep, the protagonist considers writing a story, but not before he prevents a possible robbery. The unknown fate of the fallen thief sparks his imagination to cite memories (a break-up, a house-sitting experience, his nine-year-old son), far-flung journeys (France, Madagascar, Nepal, and beyond), philosophical ponderings (Marx, Hitler, his dead fish named Kierkegaard), obscure historical observations (transracial adoption in the Netherlands, Yasser Arafat's love of Tom and Jerry cartoons), and much more. Disparate details, devices, and themes all coalesce into "this story [that] is also a story about the process of writing a story." Defying labels, Jung—an enigmatic sensation in South Korea whose chameleon-like linguistic talent has allowed him to render 40-plus English-language titles into Korean (from the likes of Germaine Greer, John Fowles, and Raymond Carver)—ultimately offers an audacious discourse on creativity, presenting readers with a labyrinth of ideas, images, suggestions, and observations all waiting and available to individual interpretation. Translator Jung deserves equal praise for smoothly deciphering the author's generous sentences and multipage paragraphs. VERDICT Audiences are likely to have two extreme reactions to this book: adulation or dismissal. Libraries with adventurous patrons will want to acquire and test this provoking treatise without delay.—Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon, Washington, DC
