문학과 지성사

Memories revived in light of historical nightmares.
A chronicle of suffering without any hope for resolution or consolation.

Throughout his literary career, Lim Chulwoo has investigated the wounds of history while maintaining an objective, intellectual gaze. In Chronicle, Monster, his fifth short story collection comprising seven stories, he chases the origin and cause of tragedies down to the grim realities.

The eponymous story “Chronicle, Monster” narrates the story of a man who suffers from hallucination, a monster that takes different shapes that is the reincarnation of a series of tragedies that happened to the people of the Korean peninsula—the Bodo League massacre, the Vietnam War, and the sinking of MV Sewol, to name just a few. Kinless and completely alone for a long time, the man, covered in blisters as the aftereffects of Agent Orange, pursues the hallucination and ends up throwing himself ahead of an oncoming subway train. In an era where it is nearly impossible to survive without losing one’s mind and where everyone flies into traps and joins collective insanity, Chronicle, Monster provides a portrait of the zeitgeist. The author’s hyperreal depiction of the prolonged state of chaos, in which victims and perpetrators, death and murder, are no longer distinguishable, feels so accurate, even frighteningly so. The main theme that penetrates this chronicle of suffering and violence is death and memory. In Lim’s stories, the past of the dead resurrects through the memories of those who remember them in the present. The author lays a persistent yet compassionate gaze on the forgotten lives that disappear from the face of the earth, leaving only the lone corpses if lucky, because remembering is his life’s work, rich with the ethical tasks of offering solidarity to the dead and suffering.