Novelist Lee Hyuk-jin (pictured) was the master of the ‘salary thriller’. It is past tense. Set in a shipyard, it depicts the contradictions and irrationality of a company, deals with class and interests within a company through an in-house romance between bankers, and was produced as a drama of the same name, and even questions the ethics of professionals set at a construction site. It depicts the struggles of office workers over salary and the strained interpersonal relationships with tension.
He came back with a new face. A new full-length novel about mad love <광인>I met this author, who published , in Yeonhui-dong, Seoul on the 22nd. After releasing his fourth full-length novel to the world, he said, “I wanted to write the best work I’ve ever written, and it’s the work I like the most.”
<광인>It fiercely delves into the love and desires of three men and women. ‘Ha-jin’, a woman who makes whiskey, and the two men who love her, ‘Jun-yeon’, a musician, and ‘Hae-won’, a stockbroker. Centered around the tense relationship between three people, persistent descriptions of alcohol, music, and money, and a narrative heading toward catastrophe unfold like the scent of whiskey.
However, when I sat down with this writer, the first thing he brought up was ‘quantity.’ It’s the era of shorts, but it’s because I published a 680-page novel. Have you ever thought about reducing the amount? This writer simply said, “I didn’t do it at all.” “Isn’t there a lot of short and immediate content, even if it’s not a book? “Like the literature I admired, I wanted to write a novel that was thick but read without realizing it was thick.”
He is a ‘long-length novelist’, which is rare in Korean literary circles. Unlike most novelists who make their debut with short stories, publish a collection of novels, and then move on to full-length novels, he made his debut with a full-length novel, and all his subsequent works are also full-length novels.
Whiskey appears as a major motif in the work. It is Hajin’s profession and a symbol of love where ‘what I love ruins me’, and is described as the essence of art that ‘distills the truth from reality’. Writer Lee explained, “I started thinking about the keyword ‘distillation’ when I became addicted to whiskey two to three years ago. I thought that if we distill human life and desires, love would eventually remain.”
In the novel, Jun-yeon says this to Hae-won: “Whether it is music, a painting, a movie, or a novel, if it is a proper work, it must create an experience. “If not, then you haven’t made anything right.” What kind of experience does the author dream of readers having through this novel?
“I wrote it in the hope that readers would be able to experience extreme love and the failure of that love. In novels, it’s okay to fail at any time and as much as you want. This is why stories cannot help but fascinate us. And only through that experience can we succeed in learning the truth of life and understanding others.”
Reporter Koo Eun-seo koo@hankyung.com
