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Jun. 14th, 2026 10:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsI've been meaning to read one of Bora Chung's short story collections, but instead I read her novel Red Sword (translated by Anton Hur) because this is the one that came into my house via my wife's library pulls. I found it striking, unsettling, minimalist and strongly visual in a way that immediately conjured up the sense for me of a particular kind of animated film -- in my mind, it's that kind of unsettling rotoscope animation, mostly black-and-white with flashes of bright signifying color.
The protagonist of Red Sword is a prisoner on a spaceship who has been brought to an alien planet with numerous other prisoners to do battle in a war that she doesn't understand. The planet is strange and white; the aliens are strange and white; big black birds fly overhead, and they're strange too. The prisoners haven't been given guns, but the people holding the prisoners don't seem fully aware that the protagonist's sword is a weapon as well. So: she has her sword. She has a lover, who dies in the first few pages. She has comrades; a pair of lesbians that she knows only as Indigo Skirt and Light Green Skirt, and an older man who seems drawn to her for reasons neither of them quite understand, but as things they don't understand go that one's pretty far down the list and gets further all the time as weirder things continue to occur. And she has memories of her childhood, a home she used to have, and hopes to have again.
The first portion of the book is mostly just a desperate struggle for survival, caught between the incomprehensible aliens on one hand and the equally incomprehensible force of their captors on the other, and then on the third hand the incomprehensible landscape of an incomprehensible planet. Then things get weirder. The book has things to say about constructed identity, the nature of the self, and the nature of big horrible systems; the arbitrary and unilateral nature of oppression under imperialism. The prose is very clear, very sparse, with a kind of deliberate simplicity that lays bare the confusion and horror of the whole situation: if you don't know or don't like what's happening, it's not on account of the way it's been told.
I don't know that I enjoyed the book, per se, but I think it will linger with me. The part that stuck with me most is when the heroine first meets another woman who looks exactly like her, also struggling through the battlefield. This is obviously a confusing and distressing situation but her reaction isn't fear, but a desperate desire to see her other self survive. She tells her the stories she loved as a child, and tries to heal her injuries.
It doesn't work. Her duplicate dies. Later, she has to fight another version of herself, and that one she kills. But the fact that her first reaction is help herself, to hope for her own survival, to share her own reality and past with the other -- I found that really moving, in a book about people who are created to be disposable and disaffected and disconnected from any reality of self. It's not a huge moment in the plot of the book, but it feels nonetheless like the pivot point of it all.
The protagonist of Red Sword is a prisoner on a spaceship who has been brought to an alien planet with numerous other prisoners to do battle in a war that she doesn't understand. The planet is strange and white; the aliens are strange and white; big black birds fly overhead, and they're strange too. The prisoners haven't been given guns, but the people holding the prisoners don't seem fully aware that the protagonist's sword is a weapon as well. So: she has her sword. She has a lover, who dies in the first few pages. She has comrades; a pair of lesbians that she knows only as Indigo Skirt and Light Green Skirt, and an older man who seems drawn to her for reasons neither of them quite understand, but as things they don't understand go that one's pretty far down the list and gets further all the time as weirder things continue to occur. And she has memories of her childhood, a home she used to have, and hopes to have again.
The first portion of the book is mostly just a desperate struggle for survival, caught between the incomprehensible aliens on one hand and the equally incomprehensible force of their captors on the other, and then on the third hand the incomprehensible landscape of an incomprehensible planet. Then things get weirder. The book has things to say about constructed identity, the nature of the self, and the nature of big horrible systems; the arbitrary and unilateral nature of oppression under imperialism. The prose is very clear, very sparse, with a kind of deliberate simplicity that lays bare the confusion and horror of the whole situation: if you don't know or don't like what's happening, it's not on account of the way it's been told.
I don't know that I enjoyed the book, per se, but I think it will linger with me. The part that stuck with me most is when the heroine first meets another woman who looks exactly like her, also struggling through the battlefield. This is obviously a confusing and distressing situation but her reaction isn't fear, but a desperate desire to see her other self survive. She tells her the stories she loved as a child, and tries to heal her injuries.
It doesn't work. Her duplicate dies. Later, she has to fight another version of herself, and that one she kills. But the fact that her first reaction is help herself, to hope for her own survival, to share her own reality and past with the other -- I found that really moving, in a book about people who are created to be disposable and disaffected and disconnected from any reality of self. It's not a huge moment in the plot of the book, but it feels nonetheless like the pivot point of it all.
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Date: 2026-06-15 04:19 am (UTC)I agree that I'm not sure whether I enjoyed the book as such -- artistically I did, prose-wise I did, but it is a quiet nonstop parade of confusion and horror -- but it'll stick with me, I think. The very end especially didn't fully work for me, but everything was so deliberate all through that it was clearly the ending the author wanted it to have.