Writer: “Of all the things that make me, how much of it is my will?” (Seoul = Yonhap News) Reporter Hwang Jae-ha = Writer Hwang Yeo-jeong’s new work ‘Breath and Particles’ is a story about the main character, who had lived forgetting the sense of being alive, discovering his self as an individual. It is a full-length novel that deals with the process.”); After majoring in design at a local university, Do Isu, a woman who left her hometown to work at an advertising company in Seoul, realizes that she is in a state of burnout (extreme fatigue and loss of motivation). .
Doisu lived without attaching much meaning to his life. I thought it was cool when the CEO of the company said, “Design your personal life,” so I imitated the way my most stylish co-workers dressed and spoke, and created a social networking service (SNS) account to gauge how others viewed me. Then, he suffers an accident where he gets trapped in the company elevator. After feeling suffocating and panicking for 30 minutes, Lee Soo suffers from extreme helplessness and quits his job after a month.
It was on a trip to Portugal after leaving the company that Doisu realized the meaning of what had happened to him. Adriana, a yoga instructor whom he met by chance, hears Lee Soo’s story and diagnoses him as “the ‘withdrawal’ of things that were not originally yours.” Isu experiences yoga for the first time in Portugal under the guidance of Adriana. As he moves according to the command to synchronize his body movements with his breathing, he is surprised and delighted to discover that he was not conscious of the fact that he was breathing.
After returning to Korea, Doi-su opens a yoga center called ‘Breath’, but the joyful feeling she felt while doing yoga in Portugal gradually fades away from her memory. A few years later, a woman appears in front of Lee Soo and asks, “Do you know a person named Gil Byeong-so?” The woman hands Doisu a book of poetry written in Portuguese, which he had completely forgotten. It was a poetry book that Lee Soo bought as a souvenir during his trip to Portugal, but without his knowledge, it ended up in the hands of Gil Byeong-so, a person he knew nothing about.
The story revealed later is as follows. Do Yi-su’s younger brother, Do Yi-young, met Gil Byeong-so, who came to cover a documentary film while working at a church prayer center, and when Byeong-so asked for a book from home as a gift, she gave her older sister Isu’s book as a gift.
Gil Byeong-so painstakingly translates the poetry collection from beginning to end, which the original owner, Do I-soo, had only roughly read. Byeong-so suddenly dies in an unexpected accident, and the woman who was his lover discovers traces of Do I-su among Byeong-so’s belongings.
Through a series of events, Doisu regains his sense of living and breathing, and gradually realizes that he is not part of society or a group, but exists as an individual, like a particle, and is constantly influenced by others.
The author explained the background of the work by saying that the first question was “What am I?” and that it has since been transformed into many forms.
“Who am I? Of all the things that make me up, how much is my will and the will of people other than me? Who are you? What does it mean to understand one person? What is an individual? How much does that mean? “Can it be expanded?” (from ‘Author’s Notes’)
‘Breath and Particles’ deals with the individual self in this way, but it is not limited to the story of one person. The question ‘Who am I?’ expands to the question ‘What is a person?’
The author also turns his attention to social issues. In the story, Do Yi-young’s best friend from middle school goes to commercial high school, but dies when the roof collapses due to heavy snow during field training at a factory. This is a motif of the case of Kim Dae-hwan, who passed away at the age of 19 in February 2014. Lee Young points out that even after his friend died, high school students continued to die and get injured due to industrial accidents during field training.
‘Breath and Particles’ is writer Hwang’s third novel. Hwang Yeo-jeong, the daughter of author Hwang Seok-young, began her writing career by winning the Munhakdongne Novel Award for ‘Ghosts of Algeria’ in 2017, and released the full-length novel ‘Call My Name’ in 2020.
Sigh. Page 252.
