문학과 지성사

Words on sand—I, you, dear, dear all of you.
All to be washed away, grain by grain.

Han Yujoo is a novelist known for her experimental prose that deviates from the formal conventions of literary fiction. In Book of Ice, the author showcases nine short stories, including “Ash Wednesday,” which made the shortlist for the 2008 Hwang Sun-won Literary Award.
Enjoying Han’s writing requires the readers to have a knack for discerning optical illusions, deviation from everyday language, and multiplicity of text. In the stories, the author’s use of repetition, congeries, negation, and inversion weaves together the speaker’s voice and action, juxtaposition and transition, and transformation of objects in the endless yet mesmerizing cycle of condensation and explosion. As a meta-fiction, Book of Ice centers on representations of fiction writing. Han’s sentences pay careful attention to the moods that cannot be put into words, like the inexplicable thrill upon seeing an unintelligible work of contemporary art, the existential task of being in time, or the gap between the tangible and intangible. As readers, we’re in for a bizarrely colorful reading experience that opens our senses to a new horizon of prose writing.