From mundane and quotidian events, Ch’oe In-Ho steadily builds an unreal and uncanny edifice—a virtual world reminiscent of Kafka or Orwell, with echoes of The Truman Show and of Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled.
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Through a series of seemingly minor juxtapositions of the familiar and the strange, K, the protagonist of Another Man’s City, gradually realizes he is inside a Matrix-like reality, populated by shape-shifting characters, and is living a virtual-reality narrative manipulated by an entity referred to as both the “Invisible Hand” and “Big Brother.”
From mundane and quotidian events, Ch’oe In-Ho steadily builds an unreal and uncanny edifice—a virtual world reminiscent of Kafka or Orwell, with echoes of The Truman Show and of Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled.
“Ch’oe challenges us to consider new possibilities for literature in an age when the divine is largely absent from literary art.” —Kwon Youngmin, Munhak sasang
Ch‘oe In-ho was born in 1945 in Seoul and graduated from Yonsei University. In 1982, he received the sixth Yi Sang Literature Prize for his novel Deep Blue Night. His work has been translated into Japanese, German, Polish and French. A prodigious drinker, he died in 2013 of cancer. In 2014 his hand prints were memorialized on the Yonsei-ro sidewalk where he frequently drank.