Your Utopia ₹599
BBora Chung, trs Anton Hur
Hachette ora Chung’s Cursed Bunny was shortlisted for the 2022 International Booker Prize. In this new oering, titled Your Utopia, and immaculately translated by Anton Hur, we meet a host of characters, some human, some decidedly not, all imbued with strong streaks of strangeness.
One hesitates to categorise this collection of shorts as pure science ction; there is a wry cocking of the snook at human laws and constructs. There is the deconstruction of corporate monopolies, land grabs, ecological missteps, the misuse of advanced technology, of love, loss, anger, dismay. If dystopia seems to be the central theme, it’s an ironical touch given that the title has the opposite word — ‘utopia’ — in it, it is a dystopia that though woven through with surreal elements, is relatable to us. Though decidedly weird, nothing is really absurd. This is basically speculative ction at its most creative, imaginative. Every robot is quite human, displaying compassion and curiosity.
And yet, that element of strangeness persists. We meet people working at the Center for Immortality Research, with most of the senior sta displaying very mortal pettiness. We watch as people get suddenly and startlingly infected with cannibalism. We root (pardon the pun) for a species of plant-human hybrids as they try to save their patch of land from what else but humans. We are moved when an AI-enabled elevator develops a fondness for a woman suering from the onset of Parkinson’s. We recoil in horror as a suspicious husband gets more than he bargained for, when he tries to keep track of his wife’s movements. We look on as Korea’s conservative society heaps harassment and condemnation on its LGBTQIA+ people. We observe a dream-catcher at work on a drug maa queen’s dreams.
The changing world
Quite like the curate’s egg, some of the tales are moving, disturbing, sweetly sentimental and stay with the reader for a while after they are done reading. Yet others seem to move at a very slow pace or follow a convoluted plot. After the second story in this collection, the reader comes to expect the twist in the tale, and starts to second-guess the story, starts to look for that twist with enjoyable anticipation. The
for a conversation with Bora Chung as part of The Hindu’s new digital series called ‘Reading Asia’. It includes Chung’s list of five best books from Korea.
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works in which they appear, along with the names of the authors, dominant themes, language, date of publication and so on. The archive has evolved to include interviews with authors who have centred the landscape in their storytelling.
There are many ways to document a city. Why look at ction? “Stories rooted in a place pulse and seethe with context, and ction is important for its porosity,” says Saini. This combination “helps us to make sense of our individual and collective ‘social totality’, otherwise unrepresentable”.
Nilanjana S. Roy, whose book Black River is in the database, agrees. “Fiction lls in our imaginations, makes us more than just strangers to one another; or at least, that is one of its promises,” reader also begins to speculate if some of the strangeness is an allegory for our current way of life. Like all of civilisation trying to eat each other. Like, the purest form of communication is one-sided info dumps. Like, if the world I was designed for has changed so much, in what way must I myself change?
The translation is so ªawless, something of the inherent Korean-ness in some of the stories gets lost in the process. However, viewed as global stories, this lot jumps over that stile with ªying colours. And this reviewer quite appreciated the fact that several Korean words appear without italics, and without a glossary at the end of the book either; the curious will need to go look up those words.
The reviewer is a Bengaluru-based author, journalist and manuscript editor. she says. Her rendering of Delhi’s edgelands in the book acknowledged “the web of relationships that Delhi both enabled in the 1980s and 1990s”, seeing beyond nostalgia the contradictions and “invisible steel fences” that sliced people and
cities apart.
A handy resource
The archive is crowdsourced and relies on readers to light its map with new entries. Over time, Ravindranath and Saini see the archive evolving as a pedagogical tool, to add colour to impersonal academic reading and policy deliberations to “help understand theory better”. Saini also envisions it to be a “handy resource for writers and translators”. The imagination doesn’t stop there. The archive insists on rethinking cities as animate landscapes; as they grow, their aspirations and identities grow too. ‘Cities in Fiction’ hopes to eventually reªect these reverberations, albeit deliberately and organically, responding to the impulse of imagination and contribution, Ravindranath says. Cities require care, and their chronicles must be pursued with a similar prudence.