When I started reading Open Door, I was desperate to find out more about her and her background, why she is the way she is. But as I carried on reading, I realised that it wasn’t her I wanted to hear about, but her descriptions of everything going on around her, the eccentric characters she encounters and the unlikely situations in which she finds herself. She is so passive that she allows fate, coincidence, life itself — whatever you want to call it — to be the driving force. For me, this makes these novels all the more intriguing and entirely unpredictable.
– Beth Fowler
This from a brilliant Glasgow Review of Books interview with Beth Fowler, translator of Open Door and Paradises by Iosi Havilio – Intern @londonkoreanist’s favourite And Other Stories author so far, perhaps (she thinks after reading this interview) because the protagonist’s unusual lack of agency is also a feature of a lot of contemporary Korean literature.
Read the full article here