Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), a leading female writer of 20th-century British literature who suffered from a nervous disorder throughout her life, left behind the famous words: "any woman born with a great gift in those days would certainly have gone crazed." Though the era and the region are different, the meaning these words carry for Korean society is not small. Should we argue that we are not like that, or should we say that we still survive by drawing on anger and madness as our energy?
Through the anthology short story collection "No One Went Mad," five female novelists have come together: Pyun Hye-young, Choi Jin-young, Chung Han-ah, Bora Chung, and Ye So-yeon. In this book, they have bound together five stories, each written on the theme of "mad women."
They throw out the message that, in a world where people drive one another mad, in fact "no one went mad," prompting readers to see the very phrase "mad woman" differently than before. The energy given off by the characters in the stories, whether mad or not, is ultimately no different from the power that keeps us all living in the world.
These works were previously serialized on Changbi's online serialization platform "Magazine Changbi." Each work contains stories that capture the honest desire, anger, and obsession of women living in the present era, as well as the structural social problems beyond them.
Pyun Hye-young's "The Economy of Cultivation" is a story that unfolds when Seok-mi, the older sister of the narrator who has been badly injured after falling off a retaining wall, proposes "immobile labor." Through the figures of Seok-mi and the narrator, who perform care labor to deceive the eyes of an insurance investigator, the work raises questions about disability and poverty, gender and care in the capitalist market. In "I'm Listening," Choi Jin-young asks whether we can truly understand another person.
Chung Han-ah's "The Women's Mountain," set against an old and worn-down prayer house, depicts the twisted beliefs of people gripped by madness, while Bora Chung's "The Breaking Woman" portrays the oppression inflicted upon women. Ye So-yeon's "Life and Breath" contains the struggle of a mother striving to understand the actions of her son, who has been sent to a juvenile detention center. 16,000 won.
