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Tag Archives: leprosy

Sorok Island joined to the mainland

12-Aug-07

Sorok Island joined to the mainland

Yi Chong-jun's (이청준) novel on the subject is called Your Paradise. Looking at the beach above you see maybe one reason. But Sorok Island (소록도) is Korea's best known leper colony. As Brother Anthony explains, in Yi's book, the subject is the relation between the individual and the collective. The setting is the remote leper colony on Sorok Island, where a clinic has been set up for the lepers. Cho Paekkŏn is the well-meaning head of the clinic who seeks to make his dream -- 'this paradise of yours,' for the victims of leprosy -- into a reality. The patients, however, remain skeptical of any notion of a paradise built as 'yours' rather than 'ours,' and do not give Dr. Cho their ...
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Last chance to see Oh Tae Seok’s masterpiece

26-Jul-07
The enigmatically titled Bicycle finishes this weekend. The play is performed by a western cast, in the English translation by Kim Ah-jeong and RB Graves, in Camden People's Theatre, an intimate space (audience capacity around 40 I would reckon) near Euston Station. Oh Tae-Seok is known for making the audience work, skipping parts of the plot to make the viewers fill in the gaps themselves. This production helps the audience in some of that work, but without spoon-feeding them, and with only one deviation from the text, as far as I can see: for a western audience, it was helpful to have the play start with the horrific incident from the Korean war, as it sets the context which may be ...
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More from Master Oh

01-Jul-07
Those of you who went to the sell-out performances of Romeo and Juliet at the Barbican last year will be interested to know that another play by Oh Tae-seok (Oh T’ae-sŏk, 오태석), The Bicycle, will be shown at the Camden People's Theatre this month, 10 - 29 July. "One night I fainted because the ghost of a young woman called out to me from her grave by the side of the road. I was so scared that I began to shake and, later, I got sick. Whereupon I submit this report of absence." Spirits of an earlier time swirl together with inhabitants of the present as a town clerk tells of the mysterious events which led to his prolonged absence from work. ...
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Susie Younger: Never ending flower

04-Nov-06

Susie Younger: Never ending flower

(Collins Harvill, 1967) Stern(10,g) To describe this book as a memoir of a Catholic missionary in South Korea in the early 1960s, while factually correct, undersells it. Yes, the author is a person of deep Christian faith, but her work in Korea is more that of a social worker than evangelist. And her observations are those of a highly intelligent, practical person armed with an Oxford PPE degree. The book is in part a well-written account of the underbelly of Korean society at the beginning of the Park Chung-hee era. Younger works with the street gangs of Daegu who make small amounts of money cleaning shoes; she starts a home for teenage prostitutes; she helps develop some unpromising acres of hillside into a ...
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Yi Chong-jun: Your paradise

17-Feb-06
(Green Integer, 2004) Stern(6,g) A puzzling story about the struggles of successive managers of a leper colony to improve the lot of the lepers. I think the Complete Review shares my puzzlement. One of the best-selling novels of 20th Century Korean literature, originally published in 1976. Related posts:Yi Mun-yol: the Poet (Harvill 1995) Stern(8,g) Novel based on the life of a...Yom Sang-seop: Three Generations (Archipelago, 2005). First published in Korean in 1931 and revised...Hwang Sok-yong: The Guest (Seven Stories, 2005) Stern(10,g) The Guest of the title is... Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.
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