Although prior knowledge of Korean culture isn’t required, it makes the stories richer to know that there are different dialects between Seoul and Pusan, and to know first-hand the pressures to marry within Korean culture. If you’re looking for unsettling stories about South Korean daily life with even uneasier endings, look no further than Bluebeard’s First Wife. Ha Seong-nan. The policeman, his own memory hazy, nevertheless convinces himself that the villagers had conspired to wed him to a girl already impregnated by another man. A detective stumbles through the woods, dodging the searchlights of night poachers.
Ha’s themes of urban strife, morality, and feminism are expressed subtly. by Open Letter. "The White Dove", "The Robber Bridegroom" and "Fitcher's Bird" (also called "Fowler's Fowl") are tales similar to "Bluebeard". Just a moment while we sign you in to your Goodreads account. Or so said Aristotle. The settings are often bleak and gritty, but evoke an uncanny familiarity. If we follow this reasoning, we cannot avoid asking: Why, then, had Bluebeard murdered his first wife? Seong-Nan once again kept my interest with their simple, oddly weird, unsettling stories. Each story is a clever investigation into the tensions between the personal and the communal, violence and peace—particularly in the lives of women. Bluebeard's First Wife, Ha Seong-nan, Janet Hong (trans) (Open Letter, June 2020) T ragedy finds its ideal form when a good character is partially responsible for her own downfall, which should unfold with the slow and inexorable force of a moral sentencing.
Eventually, the wife discovers that Jason and Chang are lovers and that Jason’s parents, unaccepting of his homosexuality, had threatened to cut him off financially if he didn’t marry a woman. As Ha proceeds to delicately investigate the emotions of each character, the more unknowable he or she seems to become. She is the Fiction Editor at Minola Review. With short stories, you never know what the stories will be about before you start reading. Shock and horror mark the latter finding, yet in Ha’s story, the wife’s reaction couldn’t be more different. Even if not all of Ha’s characters are “good”, they still prove to be pitifully wretched creatures. Without the collection’s title to hint at this potential interpretive lens, it might even go unnoticed. The wives struggle to balance housework with work or childcare, sometimes both, as the husbands reveal unnerving behaviors and pasts. The reader, particularly the female reader, is certain to feel that they already know the story long before the end. This collection of stories is fantastic and fanciful, nearly as brilliant as the author’s other recent book, ‘Flowers of Mold’. There is a sense that she feels she “had it coming,” that her fate was too good to be true. In Bluebeard’s First Wife, Ha explores big cities and small rural towns where ambition, familial responsibilities, and expectations of marriage coalesce to reveal hidden sides to neighbors, wives, and husbands. How well do people know each other, and what can happen when they are carried away by obsessions? In her hands, the fairy-tale works as a photo filter, bringing into clearer relief her actual subject: the horrors of daily contemporary life. Ha Seong Na is developing the same motifs that return with ever more exuberance in Flowers of Mold. The pain of the loss is doubled for her—in ways that it is not for the husband—in large part due to this burden of living with her shortcomings in the expected role of mother. She finally asks: With the end of a story comes the end of another life, fractured by grief, betrayal, disillusionment, or death itself—all the while, Ha’s literary dreamscape remains pristine. She rifles through pictures, annoyed at the way her daughter eludes the photographer in each one. Most of them evade me and resist imprinting. The volume’s title comes from the famous French folktale, first written down by Charles Perrault and published in 1697. The hallucinatory logic of Ha’s stories reverberates both within and across her stories. Stripped of their thickly-slabbed-on symbolism, fairy-tales are essentially this, too—stories of domestic strife, heightened accounts of common human troubles, cautionary tales about the ways our inescapable psychology can lead us down wrong paths, be they figurative or those found in dark forests. Real life meets fairy-tale and the result, for her, is a nightmare. The stories mostly deal with secrets, crimes and families, and almost all are have a female first-person narrative voice.
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The titular story in Ha’s collection, “Bluebeard’s First Wife,” follows the new wife of a secretive South Korean man living in New Zealand. These women are exhausted. As Ha splays open her characters’ desires and regrets, the stories offer a refracted look at our own worries, glimpses into worlds where we make all the wrong choices and there is no escape from the consequences. Be the first to ask a question about Bluebeard's First Wife. Janet Hong is a writer and translator based in Vancouver, Canada. They find the bizarre in the family home, in friendship, or as in the titular story: marriage. My least favorite stories are the ones that follow a more concrete path with less ambiguity, and often times the endings will make or break a story.
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