It is Spring and I am continuing to clear and clean my bookshelves.
The premise of Hye-Young Pyun’s City of Ash and Red is intriguing: a book first published (in Korean) in 2010 so accurately described a pandemic that would envelope our own world 10 years later. If you have ever had a nightmare, in the still of the night and in deep slumber, of trying to escape something unknown, of dialling a phone number and getting nowhere, of no-one knowing who you are, of not being able to breath, of just ironically trying tho escape the nightmare that is your nightmare, then you will recognise the words Ms Pyun has so skilfully and devastatingly put down on paper.
However the story is also about the unravelling of the man’s (we don’t know his name) personal life. It is ugly, lonely, bitter and soul-destroying. I would never wish this kind of relationship on anyone. I don’t know how you could recover from it, and reading the book ultimately sucked any feelings happiness and hope out of my life for that day. It was Kafka’s The Trial x Camus’ The Plague on steroids.
Fortunately I went to watch Andy Weir’s screen version of Project Hail Mary which restored my faith in the goodness of humanity. I am reading the printed version now.
City of Ash and Red by Hye-Young Pyun, English translation by Sora Kim-Russell, published by Arcade, ISBN 978-1-62872-781-4