Recent Books
Death and the Maiden
Ariel Dorfman, translated from Spanish by Kim Myung-hwan and Kim Elisa; Changbi: 412 pp., 18,000 won
This book carries four plays written by Ariel Dorfman, a renowned Argentine-Chilean novelist and playwright. After briefly serving in the Salvador Allende administration, Dorfman was exiled when General Pinochet seized power through a coup d'etat and went to the United States.
Such experiences lie behind Dorfman's works which focus on painting the reality and trauma of living under an authoritarian regime, which will strike a chord among those sharing a similar history. His signature play from 1991, ``Death and the Maiden,'' is about a woman who believes she recognized a doctor who masterminded the gang rape and torture she suffered during the dictatorial rule; now she wants the doctor to own up to what he did. ``Widows'' deals with a rather familiar situation in Korea _ men in a village disappear as the military takes them away. The remaining women, hardened but persistent, do not want to give up. This is currently being staged in a musical version under the title ``Dancing Shadows,'' adapted by Dorfman himself, in Seoul.
``The Other Side,'' is a black comedy Dorfman wrote in 2005 with the situation of South and North Korea specifically in mind, while the one-act play ``Purgatorio'' further explores complicated questions concerning resolution of the past put forward in ``Death and the Maiden.''
The tales are grim, but they are not necessarily pessimistic. They are rare finds to come across these days, posing serious questions based on tense reality.
Children Collector 1-2
Sabine Thiesler, translated from German by Kwon Hyuk-joon; Changhae: 328 pp. each, 10,000 each
Readers' reviews on this book, posted on German Amazon Web site, are extremely split; some praise the author's capability to keep it tense and real, while others _ mostly parents _ say they were too appalled after a few pages and had to put the book down, because it was too gruesome for them to contemplate their kids treated in a such a way.
Korean criminal thriller fans will be thrilled anyway to meet this rather unique piece of crime fiction from Germany, which reveals the criminal right in the beginning but keeps readers hooked on the story, minutely describing the unfolding of a series of kidnappings, abuse and murder of blonde-haired, fair-skinned boys. The parents of the missing boys and the detectives who desperately track the few clues left are also portrayed very realistically. While the author chooses not to depict the abuse too graphically, the writing nevertheless conjures up images that can be actually quite nauseating. Not for the faint-hearted.