By Chung Ah-young
Staff Reporter
While obesity seems to be almost ``sinful'' at least in a modern society that puts more emphasis on how people look, people are ironically resorting to more fatty foods such as donuts and hamburgers. They cannot resist savory temptation of such convenience foods while at the same time obsessing on their health and body shape. What's behind this complexity?
Swedish author Lena Andersson molds the issue into her fictional novel ``Duck City,'' satirizing the duality of modern society in which people are fixated with their looks and at the same time with fast food.
The novel is set in the city of ducks that suffers from obesity due to the wide spread of junk food. However, as they develop health problems such as diabetes and heart strokes, the government declares a war against obesity. The citizens are forced to lose weight ― amid the influx of junk food ― and obesity is regarded as a sin.
While the government outwardly fights against unhealthy eating, it has a collusive relation with the fast food business moguls to push customers to eat the latter's greasy and sugar-coated donuts. In this chaotic situation, some overweight ducks are serially killed after being heinously whipped and stuffed with donuts. The citizens are stripped of their freedom of choice for food under the hidden power of capitalism.
``The main motivation was to explore the empire's falling. I mean Duck City is like an allegory for the Western Empire or the United States. And I was thinking what happens when it falls and declines like the Roman Empire,'' Andersson said in an interview with The Korea Times.
Andersson said that the whole Western world is afflicted with a rising number of diabetes patients and other obesity-related sicknesses.
``Maybe they would eat themselves to death. Americans are on a bad path right now. That was my main theme that I want to explore and how does this happen,'' she said.
The writer explained that she also wants to explore the issue of fanaticism and collective neuroses, and fundamental thinking in the form of eating habits or the psychology of eating. ``It's a kind of metaphor for all sick behavior or fundamentalism. When you go further and further into starvation you chose yourself, your mind becomes totally obsessed with not eating. It's like a religion where everything is sinful and there is a heaven at the end where you are thin and don't need energy anymore. So it's a metaphor for religious fundamentalism or political fundamentalism. I think it's the same psychology at work in both these cases,'' she said.
The dystopian novel, however, is a playful book full of humor and satire about ducks, not humans. The characters of the novel are from the comic ``Donald Duck'' for literary reasons to add humor in it. ``I need a distance to my characters when I write. You get away from realism and you have certain demands that things should be logical and credible,'' said Andersson.
Through the novel, the author wants readers to think for themselves and discover the theme with some fun. She explains psychology behind obsessive eating behavior because it's hard to understand why people get extremely fat if you never had a problem with eating.
``It's hard to understand and sympathize with it but there are so many things that happen to your hormones and self image and most people go fat, actually, starve most days and they eat huge quantities when they eat because they are so hungry. So they are like trapped in hopeless behavior and hopeless endeavors to lose their fat and they stop eating altogether and they don't eat at all and that doesn't work. I want to explain how this behavior can be in this way … the psychology of it,'' she said.
In fact the author was actually a victim of an eating disorder when she was a cross country athlete when she was young.
``You need to be really thin to do that (cross country running). I went to the fat spiral of eating behavior. So I experienced every character's problems in the book. It's from personal experience of everything,'' she said.
Now she knows how to strike a balance in her life but it took her some years. ``Today I try to eat healthily and exercise and eat what I want, but not too much and not too little,'' the author said.
``Duck City'' is her first publication in Korea and also in Asia ― it has been translated in Finnish, German, Dutch and Norwegian.
``I am amazed that my novel found its way to Korea. It's hard to understand how that happened,'' she laughed.
Andersson is one of the rising number of Swedish authors, known for her poignant and sarcastic writing style reflecting various social issues such as multiculturalism and religious terrorism.
She mostly gets inspiration from the so-called undercurrent society happening underneath the world.
Concerning her next novel, Andersson said she will write a love story and hasn't yet chosen the characters. ``Maybe I need to make ducks out of the characters too or apes maybe to get that distance because it's all over me and I can't get it … Something about writing needs a sort of distance not to be involved as a writer just something that makes it easier to write. You have to make choices all the time ― what to tell and what not to tell,'' she said.