Title: Wasted time
Korean Title:허송세월
Author:Kim Hoon
Publisher:Nanam punliser
ISBN:9788930041683


336page /135*195mm 385g

Important! Please read before you order!

>>>This book is written in Korean.

About This Book

Description The weight of life, aging, illness, and death endured with the lightness of wasted time . Sincere writing that captures the tears and laughter of the times

. “When an obituary is printed on the cell phone, death is right before your eyes like a delivery product.” _「The Joy of Aging」, p. 7.

Novelist Kim Hoon has returned with the prose book, Wasted Time. As can be sensed from the first sentence that is clearly printed on the paper, he is a ‘practical worker who writes’ who even considers death as a daily routine. Although he is already approaching eighty, he looks at, thinks, and writes more diligently than ever. The traces of his long and sincere labor are clearly evident in this book.

“Let’s die lightly and send off the departing person coolly. Even simple funeral procedures can realize polite condolences. Let’s return to lightness for both the departing person and the departing person, as well as the medical practice. You can see everything if you look into the bone ashes. With this lightness, you can endure the heaviness of life. In the end, it is light.” _「The Lightness of Ashes」, page 54

If you pass the introduction, “The Joy of Growing Old,” which confesses the love and hate feelings he developed for alcohol and cigarettes after entering old age, and open Part 1, “Waiting for the Bird,” you will find 14 essays that provide a glimpse into Kim Hoon’s present. Confessing that he has been very sick due to cardiovascular disease, he mocks himself for living each day with a body that literally has “bone disease in every part of the body and organ,” and ponders what kind of will he will leave before his body completely withers away and he eventually turns to bone dust.

The sorrow of having to lie in a hospital room and watch urine collect in a urinal naturally leads to reflections on the hardships of living beings who have to endure the heaviness of birth, aging, illness, and death with the lightness of wasted time. Sitting in Ilsan Lake Park and spending his old age basking in the sun, he dreams of his words escaping this hardship and reaching the bare face of life. He is “busy wasting time.”

He, who is busy wasting time, turns his eyes in Part 2, “Writing and Food,” to “everyday life of earning a living, fighting, loving, hating, supporting, and nagging.” For him, who once complained about “the boredom of earning a living,” writing that accurately captures the sorrow of making a living is a lifelong task. He wants to put language close to the center of life by discarding “words that are like chaff because they are funny, and words that are like goblins because they are excited,” and using only the necessary words. This is to boldly cut off the weak parts of speech that further widen the gap between the writer and the mother tongue, and to “run straight toward things without going around in circles.”

“On days when things that you want to write and things that you think are worth telling others are bubbling inside you, you have to hold on to the reins of your sentences even tighter. On days like this, adjectives and adverbs get in the way, the characters’ speech becomes excited, and definitive endings rush in to overpower the writer. Days when the writing is going well, the number of manuscripts increases, and the manuscript fee increases are dangerous. On days like this, before finishing a day’s work and going out to the park to play, I am afraid that others will see when I pick out the words that have come out of the writing and skim off the oil.” _「Thinking about Adjectives and Adverbs」, p. 143.

The effort to use only the necessary words accurately is also revealed in the way he shows affection for simple objects that clearly reveal the texture of life. Looking into the “dark and cool” holes of Gaya pottery at the museum, he thinks about the sorrow of Gaya potters who fell to Silla’s iron weapons. On the other hand, when he sees the dung bowls that have returned as an extension of everyday life’s waste, he feels inspired by the “living things that were alive and well.” The simple, “pure and unexaggerated” words that seem to come from these objects that “have placed themselves in a low position” are a passage that hints at the direction his prose language is headed.

“Since I am a person who values ​​rice, I first looked at the artifacts related to eating rice, but there were too many to see them all. There were mortars, grindstones, jars, pickled vegetables, kimchi jars, soy sauce jars, liquor jars, rice bowls, soup bowls, kettles, plates, trays, pots, earthenware pots, bowls, and tangkkae (boilers) without end. The endless objects had their own expressions, and the consistent texture of these expressions was the simplicity and reality of the things that are essential in people’s daily lives.” _「Museum’s Shit Bucket」, p. 179

When we reach Part 3, “Blue Days,” the author extends his gaze further and focuses on those who have lived or are living in troubled times. Darwin and Fitzroy, the brothers Jeong Yak-yong and Jeong Yak-jeon, and the youth of Ahn Jung-geun come to mind as they intersect in his sentences. These names continue with Bang Jeong-hwan, Im Hwa, Choi In-hun, Park Kyung-ni, Baek Nak-cheong, Shin Kyeong-rim…

“Despite the pain of resentment and alienation shown in “Farming”, Shin Kyeong-rim’s expression is clear and good. His face, facing the snow, shows the basis of innocence. This moment shows the essence that rises from within. There is no intention to see something at all costs. The camera, which has stepped back, saw that moment. That moment was visible. The snowflakes were thick that day. Shin Kyeong-rim in the photo seems to be smiling because he likes the snow.” _「Park Kyung-ni, Shin Kyeong-rim, Baek Nak-cheong, and Kang Woon-gu」, p. 264

He faithfully gropes for the remaining places of the worries and hopes of those who tried to create blue days while living in a cold era, and hurries his steps toward the suffering of rebirth ‘here and now.’ It is to commemorate the deaths of countless neighbors who were “squeezed to death, trampled to death” in the harsh reality. He does not provide clear answers to the problems of reality. He only thinks about “what tone of voice should we use to speak to this world.” In a world seething with words that are harsh to one another, and a world that is difficult to speak and painful to hear, his sentences move forward steadily.

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