Ch'oe Yun is a Korean author known for her breathtaking versatility, subversion of authority, and bold exploration of the inner life. Readers celebrate her creative play with fantasy and admire her deep engagement with trauma, history, and the vagaries of remembrance. In this collection's title work, There a Petal Silently Falls, Ch'oe explores both the genesis and the aftershocks of historical outrages such as the Kwangju Massacre of 1980, in which a reported 2,000 civilians were killed for protesting government military rule. The novella follows the wanderings of a girl traumatized by her mother's murder and strikes home the injustice of state-sanctioned violence against men and especially women. "Whisper Yet" illuminates the harsh treatment of leftist intellectuals during the years of national division, at the same time offering the hope of reconciliation between ideological enemies. The third story, "The Thirteen-Scent Flower," satirizes consumerism and academic rivalries by focusing on a young man and woman who engender an exotic flower that is coveted far and wide for its various fragrances. Elegantly crafted and quietly moving, Ch'oe Yun's stories are among the most incisive portrayals of the psychological and spiritual reality of post-World War II Korea. Her fiction, which began to appear in the late 1980s, represents a turn toward a more experimental, deconstructionist, and postmodern Korean style of writing, and offers a new focus on the role of gender in the making of Korean history.
Author
Ch'oe Hyon-mu (born 1953), better known by her pen name Ch'oe Yun (This is the author's preferred Romanization per LTI Korea) is a South Korean writer and professor of French literature. Ch'oe's works are varied, but typically founded in particular political contexts. The Gray Snowman is told by a young woman on the edges of the 1980s’ dissident movement, and Father’s Surveillance and A Voiceless Window show the pain of families split by the Korean War and the sundering of the nation. Ch'oe, however, keeps her lens firmly fixed on the interior lives of her characters, even as they are stuck in the larger web of history. Ch'oe's narrative style, following the twisted inner world of her characters, is often non-realist. Ch'oe frequently uses memory as one of her themes, but refuses to indulge in appeals to cheap sentiment. Many of her works, including There a Petal Silently Falls (1988), Gray Snowman (1991), and Whispers (1993), are semi-autobiographical depictions of the events surrounding the Kwangju Uprising. Her 1994 work The Last of Hanako won the Yi Sang Literary Award. [excerpted from Wikipedia]
