Authors
Lee Mankyo Novelist South Korea
“My writing started from the extravagant and vague fantasy that a life of writing would be a life worthwhile in many ways. Now I know that writing is above all hard and lonely work. But I also realize that enduring hard and lonely work in the fullest is the basic attitude for someone who searches for a life worthwhile. Though I still do not clearly recognize what that kind of life would be, I do know that life is something lead by boundless yearning for the unknown. For that life, the unknown life worthwhile, I nowadays spend my days eagerly looking up good books to read, I sometimes write, and most of the time I just sit still doing nothing in particular. As I have never known what kind of books I’d be publishing until I’d actually written one, I myself remain equally curious about my future writing.”
The readers of Mankyo (b. 1967)’s fiction will undoubtedly be entertained by its verbal energy which brings to mind a garrulous exchange between gossipers. Various happenings in the lives of ordinary urbanites are often of a serious nature, entailing many social implications, yet the way they are told is invariably lighthearted and jovial.
In Marriage is Madness (결혼은 미친 짓이다, 2000) - his most well-known novel, which was awarded the 24th Writer of the Year Award as well as made into a movie by the same title - a series of frank and amusing dialogues between two lovers strips away the layers of hypocrisy and falsehood surrounding marriage, sex and love in the modern age. His second novel, Will You Come Play at Meokko’s House? (머꼬네 집에 놀러올래?, 2001), paints an entertaining as well as insightful picture of family dynamics during the Asian financial crisis of 1997. The childlike frankness of the narrator allows a candid view of the gravity of the situation and enables moments of laughter as well as pathos.
What Mankyo critiques through his parody is the hypocrisy surrounding the conventions of society, and the greed for power which is disguised as a concern for order and communal good. In 2003, he published the novel Children Cannot Suppress Laughter (아이들은 웃음을 참지 못한다) as well as a collection of short stories, Mean Girl, Good Guy (나쁜 여자, 착한 남자).
Participation Program
Round Table 3 Newness in my literature
Round Table 2 Newness in my literature
Round Table 1 Newness in my literature