Ha Seong-nanFlowers of Mold: Stories

Abstract

behavior of Domino, another strongman. Abir is not involved in the action at the nightclub but only observes this jungle of bullies, thugs, and strongmen. He is a sympathetic young kid, curious about the world around him, but he does not try to counter or stop violence either. In no way does Yarak glamorize the world of the militias, but he does describe the strongmen and the ugly sideshows that go along with their military operations: looting, rape, gambling, addiction and mafia-style murders. For Abir, the only relief in this grim atmosphere is his friendship with Azizi, who is a thoughtful, self-taught man who reads political and history books, listens to music, and prepares leisurely meals in his simple room. Azizi has recorded “secrets” of the militia in a notebook—and Abir’s name is mentioned. After Azizi’s murder, Abir flees and goes underground, fearful that he will be next. At first, the hospital run by nuns seems an ideal place to hide, but it is no haven from terror, paranoia, and corruption either. Like an onion, the layers of corruption are revealed, day by day: negligent doctors kill patients; casual, sleazy affairs are rife; employees defraud the hospital with scams, pilfer petty cash from the drawer, and scavenge valuables off of corpses. Abir finds himself sympathizing with the corpses, especially of ordinary and poor people—death is the great equalizer. Yarak crafts a poignant, if not kind, end to the book as Abir’s ultimate fate echoes the events that set it into motion. Gretchen McCullough American University in Cairo Ha Seong-nan Flowers of Mold: Stories Trans. Janet Hong. Rochester, New York. Open Letter. 2019. 212 pages. Flowers of Mold, Mouthful of Birds, Apple and Knife, The Night Circus, Alphaland, Mars—these are just a few of the surrealist collections by women writers from around the world that have been published in the last two years. Whether the authors write in Korean, Spanish, Indonesian, or any other language, their stories teeter on the edge of the fantastic, guiding readers into seemingly mundane narratives only to rip the rug out from under us to expose reality’s dark underbelly. One wonders if this trend is due to the anglophone world demanding more of these stories in English or if this kind of story is a reflection of the zeitgeist. Either way, surrealist stories like those in Ha Seong-nan’s Flowers of Mold invite us to look at our world anew and take notice of the nameless people we pass on the street each day. Like The Vegetarian —another surreal and haunting text by a Korean woman—Flowers of Mold unsettles and unnerves, effortlessly. Here we should is an admixture of the universal and the partisan . His sheer intelligence and uniqueness make him worth reading, but as he seeks to explain and defend his views, he sometimes doesn’t seem aware of the vulnerability of his assumptions, stated as facts. For example, while casting a disapproving eye on certain formal poets of the 1950s, he describes their use of metrical lines and end-rhyme as machinelike, which then allows him to conflate poetic form with social form and the politics of the era, not conscious, seemingly, of the excess of the 1960s (his own formation time) and its excess as a reaction to the hysterical conformity of the 1950s, which itself was a reaction to the chaos and total breakdown in world order of the 1940s. Effective poetic form evolves from the qualities of the language and our brains’ needs and preferences in processing information, a topic too involved to develop here. A more egregious example is found in Bly’s essay “A Wrong Turning in American Poetry,” which is generally interesting and well developed in a successive comparison of “good” and “bad” verse. In it, he quotes five lines from Elizabeth Bishop’s “At the Fishhouses ” as bad poetry, stating, “The facts of the outer world push out the imagination and occupy the poem themselves. The lines become inflexible. The poem becomes heavy and stolid, like a toad that has eaten ball bearings.” Bly seems to completely miss and misunderstand Bishop’s use of image...