문학과 지성사

Some feel-good images emerged and disappeared like a mirage.
Desperate wishes to seize the slightest possibility
and the once-in-a-lifetime portrait of hope that we all dream of.

Published in November 2023, Blessings is the third short story collection of Kim Hye-jin, an inimitable talent in Korean literature. Having started her writing career in 2012, the author has won major literary awards in Korea and abroad throughout the past decade. The rights to her novel, Concerning My Daughter, have been sold to numerous publishers internationally, including in Japan, Vietnam, Taiwan, the Czech Republic, the U.K., and France, among others. Blessings, published after a three-year hiatus since her second book of short stories, encloses the author’s outstanding works that have instantly garnered attention from the literary world, such as “Cotton Mansion,” the winner of the 2021 Munhakdongne Young Writers Award; “Miae,” the winner of the 2022 Award; and “Blessings,” shortlisted for the 2022 Kim Yu-jeong Literary Award. During her acceptance speech at the 2023 Kim Yu-jeong Literary Award ceremony last August, Kim Hye-jin remarked, “The award feels like a request, a command that I can keep trusting the innumerable coincidences and misunderstandings.” Having endeavored to explicate such coincidences and misunderstandings in the throes of life, the author faces con icts with much thicker skin in this short collection.

While all eight stories in Blessings are about housing, the physical qualities of a home are rarely described. Instead, what’s covered in length are the people inhabiting the homes, the times they spend there, and the relationships formed through housing. In Korean society, where according to literary critic Yi So “the commercial value of a home overpowers its function as a place of residence,” the happenings around the homes embody the unmitigated clash against the class, gender, regional, and generational norms.

Blessings illustrates its social commentary through the characters who come from a range of social backgrounds. Whether a realtor or a janitor, the individuals bearing their own myriad reasons incessantly spew words at each other. Gushed unilaterally, the words dissipate without reaching anybody’s ear, while the words that are truly important do not even make it out of the mouth. Even in the predicament where “what’s spoken is up to the speaker” and “what’s heard is up to the listener”(from “Bicycle and the World”), they ask one another, “You see what I’m saying? Do you know what I mean?” Concentrating all their might on speaking and listening to the stories that “are too remote and can never be grasped,” the characters in Blessings persist in seeking the possibility of communication despite continued failures. Amid the coincidences and misunderstandings born of words and silence, they realize that we need “imagination more than comprehension” to have an honest conversation.