cover image Arriving in a Thick Fog

Arriving in a Thick Fog

Jung Young Moon, trans. from the Korean by Mah Eunji and Jeffrey Karvonen. Deep Vellum, $15.95 trade paper (176p) ISBN 978-1-64605-043-7

Jung (Vaseline Buddha) reflects on the boundaries between autobiography and fiction in this maudlin and meandering collection of four linked novellas. In “Dog Ear,” the unnamed narrator meditates on the tedium of the everyday while folding and unfolding a canine’s ear flap. In “At Penal Colony X,” the same narrator is stalled writing a story about a person, based on himself, who picks up pebbles in one place and discards them in another. The title novella finds the narrator envisioning himself swimming across a lake in the middle of the night and blissfully drowning, and in “A Certain State of Incapacity,” he wonders if he might write a story about a person who falls into a series of unpredictable associations. “Perhaps I am writing that story now,” he muses. Though the questions the narrator contemplates are often rich, the ruminations on art and life, reality and the imaginary, and animal and human consciousness become trying amid the endless stream of disconnected ideas and images. Only the most generous readers will find something to grasp in Jung’s convoluted sentences, redundancies, and ambient listlessness. (Feb.)