Your Utopia 그녀를 만나다 by Bora Chung 정보라

" I was not familiar with Bora Chung’s writing when I saw this book on amazon, but having read that her previous book was a National Book Award finalist for translated literature and the fact that this book, “Your Utopia,” was a collection of short stories, I decided to give it a try. The stories are difficult to categorize, but I’d say they would mostly fit best into the category of literary fiction with elements from science fiction and horror genres mixed in. I have to admit that the latter are two genres I rarely enjoy reading. But the stories in “Your Utopia” really transcend the confines of genre. These are stories are not your average horror or sci fi stories. Instead, they are wonderfully thought-provoking and imaginative stories, each set sometime in the future. The story that I liked best was “A Song for Sleep,” which is about an AI presence in an apartment building elevator who develops loving feelings for an elderly resident. Some of the stories were a bit unsettling, but that didn’t deter me from finishing them. On the contrary, the stories in this collection are the kind that pique your curiosity to the point where you simply know that you cannot possibly stop reading them until the end. The themes of human loneliness and isolation are present throughout the book, but the stories are also about so much more than that. This is not a book I expected to affect me in any great way, but the some of the stories touched me in ways that caused me to think and feel deeply about what I had read. Ms Chung is an incredibly gifted writer whose future writing I most assuredly look forward to reading....."

'그녀를 만나다'를 'To meet her'라고 영어로 번역이 되어있다. 한국판 제목이나 책의 커버만을 보면 '서정성'이라는 단어를 떠올리게 되는데.... 예상한 내용과는 다른 거 같다. 이 작품은 SF, 호러, 액션 장르로 분류할 수 있는 내용들로 가득 찬 단편집인 거 같다. 문장의 구조는 무난하지만 단어들에 있어서 난도가 있을 수 있다.