The Portable Library of Korean Literature/ Short Fiction 8

by Wanseo Park
Trans. by Ryu, Sukhee

Original title: Ku Kaurui Sahul Tong-an
size: 18.8x12cm, 87pages. publisher: Jimoondang, 2001.

About this book
Three Days in That Autumn is a novella that delves into the grim irony of women's life-giving capacity. A gynecologist facing retirement must reckon with the legacy of her traumatic past. Herself a victim of a rape during the Korean War who had to undergo an abortion, the doctor devotes her career to freeing women from the agony of carrying an unwanted baby.
Paradoxically, her obsessive devotion to aborting unplanned pregnancies actually functions as a tool for perpetuating sex as a trade, and her own emotional dysfunction even allows her to find the sardonic pleasure of retaliation in the decrepitude of the women she services. In her final three days of work, however, she comes to recognize her sublimated longing for self-healing and redemption in her sudden inexplicable need to deliver a living life to be loved and cared for.
-- From the back cover

"...offers glimses of a society at once anchored in and imprisioned by strict Confucian mores and buffeted by war, political unrest and massive emigration.... 'Three Days in That Autumn' is told by a doctor who avenges her own rape every day in her work as an abortionist... vividly focused."
-- The New York Times Book Review