Novel · A way to begin
The Square
광장
Choe In-hun · 1960
Synopsis
Yi Myeong-jun, a released prisoner of war, is travelling aboard the Tagore to a neutral country and looks back over his life. A philosophy student in Seoul after liberation, he lodged with a banker, his mother dead and his father gone over to the North, where he served the propaganda effort. Questioned by the Southern police because of this father, he in turn makes his way to the North, where he finds not the public square he was looking for but the slogan. The war brings him back to Seoul. Between two regimes and two women, Yun-ae and then Eun-hye, he looks for somewhere to live.
Context
The text first appeared in the review Saebyeok, in the November 1960 issue, which came out in October, a few months after the student revolution that had overthrown Rhee Syng-man; the 1961 volume expanded it by about two hundred manuscript sheets. Its preface says that one cannot live without going to the square. The Kyunghyang Shinmun links the subject to the seventy-six prisoners who left in 1953 for third countries. The author kept revising it, in 1967, 1973, 1976, 1989, 2008 and 2010, the last version changing a scene of violence into a dream.
Who it is for
A short novel, readable without knowing the history of the division; translated into French in 1994 and twice into English.
Prizes and reception
Reprinted more than two hundred times according to the Kyunghyang Shinmun; translated into English by Kevin O'Rourke and then by Kim Seong-kon.
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