Author: Woo Da-young
Translated by: Stella Kim
Publisher: Asia Publishers, 2019
Original title: 창모
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As this is an Asia Publishers title, it’s pretty difficult to obtain outside of Korea.
Text from the listing on Kyobo website, fed through the Papago translation engine:
An inner crevice, a subtle look in between
In April 2019, Woo Da-young’s “Changmo” was published as the 25th work of K-fiction. Woo Da-young began her work in 2014 with the Rookie of the Year award for “Literature of the World”. In 2018, he published his first novel, “The Signs of Night and Lovers,” and Woo Da-young is a writer who believes that all coincidences in the world gather to create causal relationships between humans, humans, society and society. Therefore, Woo Da-young’s novels are solid and delicate with numerous coincidences, closely following the movements of characters and events.
Changmo is a person of interest that many people want to avoid and avoid. Changmo terrorized people with actions that were not known even during his school days, and some common sense would never think of. Chang-mo’s friend, “I,” spends his daily life observing Chang-mo without any emotion and maintaining a proper distance that is neither close nor far away.
In the commentary of Changmo, Heo Hee, a literary critic, says that writer Woo Da-young is interested in the hint of coincidence and is sensitive to the feeling that something will happen, and is excellent at revealing him to the novel. The accidental probability of countless (impossible) possibilities is changed by us, citing an example of a “me” descriptor who understands the mechanism of thinking and moving by a person with antisocial personality disorder, who worries whether to define “changmo” simply as a terror or show human goodness.