Literature

Derinkuyu

An Jisook
Pages
264
Dimensions
140*205
ISBN
978-89-6545-606-3 03810
Price
15,000KRW
Date
June 2019
Contents
Novel
*Selected by Arts Council Korea for a creative writing grant in 2018

Min Hyeonsu, who is out of work only editing posts on Wikipedia occasionally, never want to contribute anything to the society. One day he is offered a part-time work from Sera, which is to bother a guy, named Song Chan-u, on the internet. Accepting the proposal, Hyeonsu starts to both dig into the man’s life and solve a puzzle of his own life. The novel is about the growths both of Hyeonsu, who suffered a traumatic experience of his brother’s death, and of the adults who have to live with the memory of Derinkuyu, the dark and complicated underground city.

Hyeonsu earns pocket money by doing some household chores in his father’s workroom but he is not just an easygoing and lazy young man relying on his parents. He has been deeply hurt by his younger days but no one cares it including himself. He becomes weak-willed and goes on a binge when stressed out.

By accepting the queer offer, his boring and ambitionless life faces strange goings-on out of sudden. Solving his riddle, he starts to listen to the stories of other people around him. You notice something is changed gradually inside him.


An Jisook  She was born in 1961, Busan, Korea. She published several books working in a cultural agency, including 1995 Seoul, Sampoong, a reportage of survivors and families of victims of the collapse accident of the Sampoong Department Store in 1995. Recently she wrote a novel The Brightness of Beauty that I Don’t Have, depicting the joy and sorrow as a lifelong temporary worker. Her second novel will be released soon.