Vaseline Buddha

December 5, 2016
Jung’s entertaining, automatically written novel begins with the narrator desiring to tell a story after the attempted robbery of his house. But the narrator soon begins meditating on what the beginning of his story actually should be, and decides to write a story that is “nothing at all” and “about the difficulty of existence, the difficulty of talking about the difficulty of existence, the double difficulty of it.” By freely associating, Jung creates a dizzying world for readers to get lost in, just as the narrator himself gets lost in attempting to tell his own story. The narrator spends time in Budapest, New York, Paris, and Rome but mixes imagination with the real events that happened to him in these places, which creates an intentionally anti-realist non-narrative. The narrator’s thoughts repeatedly return to some subjects, notably objects floating down rivers that serve as reminders and meditations on what makes a story. This discursive book—sometimes frustrating, sometimes beautiful—reminds readers of Beckett, one of the narrator’s literary obsessions.

September 15, 2016

As narratives go, little happens in Jung's latest translated-into-English title: unable to sleep, the protagonist considers writing a story, but not before he prevents a possible robbery. The unknown fate of the fallen thief sparks his imagination to cite memories (a break-up, a house-sitting experience, his nine-year-old son), far-flung journeys (France, Madagascar, Nepal, and beyond), philosophical ponderings (Marx, Hitler, his dead fish named Kierkegaard), obscure historical observations (transracial adoption in the Netherlands, Yasser Arafat's love of Tom and Jerry cartoons), and much more. Disparate details, devices, and themes all coalesce into "this story [that] is also a story about the process of writing a story." Defying labels, Jung--an enigmatic sensation in South Korea whose chameleon-like linguistic talent has allowed him to render 40-plus English-language titles into Korean (from the likes of Germaine Greer, John Fowles, and Raymond Carver)--ultimately offers an audacious discourse on creativity, presenting readers with a labyrinth of ideas, images, suggestions, and observations all waiting and available to individual interpretation. Translator Jung deserves equal praise for smoothly deciphering the author's generous sentences and multipage paragraphs. VERDICT Audiences are likely to have two extreme reactions to this book: adulation or dismissal. Libraries with adventurous patrons will want to acquire and test this provoking treatise without delay.--Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon, Washington, DC

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