Garbage & Rat Guts
City of Ash and Red by Hye-Young Pyun. Translated by Sora Kim-Russell. Arcade Publishing, New York, 2018. 245 pages.
Dystopian novels are filled with characters wandering, alone and disoriented, through post-apocalyptic hell-scapes. Men, women, and children moving from one horror to the next, bearing witness to the inherent cruelty of their fellow man. There are lots of options open to a writer exploring the end of the world. Look at Defoe’s Journal of a Plague Year, Well’s War of the Worlds, Kosinski’s The Painted Bird, McCarthy’s The Road, parts of Atwood’s Madd Addam trilogy, and even the short, paranoid novels of Joao Gilberto Noll. All fall comfortably within the realm of dystopia. As do the visceral style of horror novels written by the Korean writer Hye-Young Pyun.
In The City of Ash & Red, a nameless protagonist – referred to only as “the man” – receives an unexpected and most likely, unmerited promotion. The new position requires he transfer to the head office in City Y of Country C. Shunned by his colleagues, who resent his success, the man attends a going away party hosted by his college friends on the eve of his scheduled departure. The next morning, he wakes with bruises on his arms and hands and no memory of the events of the previous night. He vaguely recalls drinking with his ex-wife’s soon-to-be ex-husband, Yujin, at the party. He remembers Yujin telling him that he and the man’s wife had begun sleeping together while she and the man were still married. He assumes he and Yujin had come to blows. Confused but oddly unfazed by his inability to remember, the man rushes around his apartment, throwing his belongings into a suitcase, and heads to the airport.
Upon arriving, the man finds Country C in the grip of a pandemic. There are mountains of trash everywhere. Sprayer trucks move through the streets, spraying disinfectant to control the vermin. The stores have been looted, and his suitcase and phone are almost immediately stolen. When he reaches his new apartment, he telephones the head office to notify them of his arrival. He’s informed there is a delay in his starting his new position. Eventually, he learns there is no new position.
Stranded in a strange country, quarantined in his apartment, unable to speak the language and unsure of what is happening – when he finally manages to reach someone at home it is Yujin. Yujin tells him that the dead bodies of their ex-wife and dog were found in the man’s old apartment. Both had been viciously stabbed. His wife, Yujin tells him, “was stabbed. A lot. Her face mashed up like she’d been stabbed in the face over and over.” The man is, of course, the chief suspect. After hanging up the phone the man tries even harder to remember what happened the night before his flight. He becomes increasingly paranoid. When three men knock on his door, he assumes they are the police and flees through the window. He evades capture by riding on top of a fumigation truck. The chapters that follow chronicle his nightmarish journey into and back out of homelessness.
There was trash everywhere – in places he could see, of course, but also in places he couldn’t see. The foul odor coming from all that neglected trash, and the same black soup that trickled out of the garbage also oozed out of the pavement and leaked up from deep inside the earth, where the old trash lay buried.
Hye-Young Pyun draws on a wide variety of ideas and themes. What starts as a kind of noirish horror novel quickly subverts expectations, revealing the influence of both existential and absurd writers. Parallels can be drawn between the disconnected main character in The Investigation, an absurdist novel by French writer Phillipe Claudel, and the protagonist of The City of Ash & Red. Both men have been dislocated due to work. Both men are nameless cogs in a corporate machine. Nothing in their sinister new environments follows the logic of their past lives. But whereas Claudel’s novel is playful, Hye-Young Pyun’s is deeply disturbing. And while Claudel’s hero, the Investigator, appears to be a man diligently attempting to carry out the brief he has been assigned, Hye-Young Pyun’s main character, the man, is clearly hiding something from the reader. Quite possibly from himself, as well. The man imagines himself a passive victim, at the mercy of events. But then shows a disquietingly casual attitude towards violence – killing a rat with his bare hands, beating another vagrant for his bench in a park, and raping his ex-wife. “He knew he was capable of hurting another person when he was angry, even if it meant risking injury to himself.”
Hye-Young Pyun provides an over-abundance of sensory data on District 4, the neighborhood in City Y where her protagonist finds himself stranded. She lavishes attention on the vilest of details. Descriptions of rat viscera, human filth, and rank garbage take up so much of the text as to feel almost performative. There to shock and disturb, but also to create a mood. City of Ash and Red is a dark book in the same way that Aliens is a dark movie. We expect the worst, and the author delivers. So well, that other dystopian novels appear sanitized in comparison. Sora Kim-Russell, who has translated both The City of Ash & Red and The Hole (another Hye-Young Pyun novel, winner of The Shirley Jackson Award), along with the work of several other prominent Korean writers, delivers a coldly precise translation. Devoid of emotion, it is an interesting contrast to the inherent tenderness of Hwang Sok-yong’s prose, another South Korean writer for whom she has translated multiple books.
When he did manage to kill one of the rats glancing around warily at its surroundings, he was filled with an unfamiliar surge of pleasure. He would stare long and hard at the bright red innards bursting out of the filthy gray hide, like an overripe pomegranate split and spread open to the sun, and then watch as others walked past, treading on the little corpse until it was just a smeared clot of blood and fur.
Eventually, the man will recover his memories, and it will be as horrible as we expect it to be. And yet his story won’t end there. As the man tries to make sense of his surroundings, this new life he has fallen into, readers are left to try to make sense of him. And while he is not an unreliable narrator, since he isn’t actually narrating, we don’t trust him. Hye-Young Pyun jealously guards the man’s secrets. Going so far as to employ a limited third-person narrator who, despite his or her supposed knowledge of the main character’s inner thoughts, only enforces the separation between the man and the reader. The reader, through careful manipulation, is made to relate to the man in the same way the man relates to those around him. An uncomfortable experience for all involved.
Last year, I reviewed Hye-Young Pyun’s The Law of Lines for The Los Angeles Review of Books. A contemporary noir novel which reinvents the genre, it’s the story of two seemingly unconnected women seeking answers after their loved ones commit suicide. The Law of Lines is also a markedly different style of novel than City of Ash and Red, in that Pyun “has populated her story with female characters who are not defined by their sexuality, their appearance, or their relationships to men”. If you enjoyed City of Ash and Red, but noticed the dearth of female characters on its pages, a novel focusing on the experiences of not just one but two female protagonists might be a refreshing change. Add to that the use of multiple points of view, a plot that revolves around something as mundane (and honest) as predatory debt, and another brilliantly executed translation by Sora Kim-Russell – The Law of Lines is a great Summer read.
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