Review by Tara Cheesman
Deep Vellum Publishing / December, 2019 / 168 pp
The samurai don’t make an appearance until after page 77 in Jung Young Moon’s Seven Samurai Swept Away in a River. For readers familiar with the South Korean writer’s work, this won’t come as a surprise, or even be a cause for concern. His books, while not exactly non-fiction, trade character and plot for endless observations on seemingly random topics like chili, the American prison-industrial complex, and the outlaws Bonnie & Clyde falling in love over mugs of hot chocolate.
Perhaps Bonnie and Clyde fell in love even before they had finished drinking the hot chocolate Bonnie made, and they decided to rob a bank together while drinking hot chocolate again, and after robbing a bank they eased the fatigue of bank-robbing by drinking hot chocolate. Hot chocolate is good for drinking anytime…
But what he lacks in focus, Jung makes up for in prose styling. His playfulness, along with his contagious enthusiasm for both the banal and the ridiculous in daily life, have earned him a dedicated English readership, who find his dry wit and affection for his fellow man compelling. Georges Perec would have adored him. So would most of the Beat writers. I’ve many questions about how Yewon Jung went about translating Seven Samurai Swept Away in a River, a long, meandering prose poem full of digressions and dependent on rhythm for structure. He makes it look easy, which I very much doubt it was.
Jung employs a stream-of-consciousness, automatic writing style that appears to flow effortlessly, as if the thoughts were transferred directly from his head onto the pages in our hands with nary an obstacle between. The result is a string of impressions and free-form associations that move smoothly one into another, never lingering too long on any one thought or idea, but remaining tenuously connected. The writer has chosen the great state of Texas as his excuse to construct a complicated topographical map of his observations on the United States of America. Written during his time at the 100 West Corsicana Artists’ & Writers’ Residency in Texas, Jung assumes the role of stranger in a strange land in this book, embracing fully all the knowledge, history and culture the tourist literature has to offer.
So, what does a South Korean author make of Texas, a state even American citizens from other states view with varying degrees of bemusement? A place that’s big and bold and saturated with cliché? Jung’s impressions are formed from superficial, man-on-the-ground observations. He cites his source for the section on Jack Ruby, who shot and killed Lee Harvey Oswald, as a pamphlet given him by a friend. He is curious about—not Ruby’s reasons for killing Oswald—but the man’s relationship to the two dogs he left behind in his car when he went to commit murder.
No one will, or should, pick up Seven Samurai Swept Away in a River for its academic rigor. And yet, Jung’s descriptions of his interactions with true Texan cowboys—among them an encounter with a drunk in a bar (by which I was so pleased that I read it out loud to my husband) and a visit to a cowboy church—make the case that Jung’s true calling might be as a cultural anthropologist.
But Texas is, ultimately, more of a vehicle than a destination. A reason to indulge in sing-song prose that rolls over the reader like the nonsense rhymes written for children by Dr. Seuss or Lewis Carroll. It takes moments to reformat the text into lines of verse, using commas and conjunctions to determine the natural breaks in the sentences.
It’s Winter now,
And I’m in Texas,
And I’m writing this,
a story about Texas,
but at the same time,
a story that deviates from being a story about Texas,
a story that does, indeed,
go back to being a story about Texas,
something that I’m writing in the name of a novel
but something that is perhaps unnamable.
Any passage can be broken down in this way, even the one in which the author explains exactly what he is doing.
The only thing that concerned me was finding out how long and until when I could go on saying things like this that were pure nonsense and that kept going off on a tangent and that had nothing to say and that, furthermore, made no difference whether they said anything or not and in the end were irrelevant, and you could say that I’m writing this in order to find that out (and it’s also to find out how much longer I can go on using repetitions of words and phrases which naturally bring pleasure to people who understand the pleasure they bring, and don’t to people who don’t understand them).
Without giving away how, or what happens, when the seven samurai eventually do turn up, it’s delightful and unexpected, like everything else in Seven Samurai Swept Away in a River. Jung Young Moon hasn’t exactly transformed Texas into a magical place, but he has used the state as an inspiration to manipulate words in magical ways. Along the way, he interweaves thoughts on writing, narrative, plot, and identity. He takes jabs at cultural stereotypes and the roles Americans—anyone, really, whose sense of self is tied too tightly to nationality—assume unconsciously. Or, perhaps, at times, too consciously. Jung is playing a game with his readers, and he plays it extremely well.
My sole criticism is that his latest book is too short. Just when we’ve grown comfortable with the narrator, leaned into the idiosyncrasies in the writing, and started to feel like we’ve made a new friend, it’s over. The author has left the building. And, like all great entertainers, he’s left his readers clamoring for more.
Tara Cheesman is a freelance book critic, National Book Critics Circle member & 2018-2019 Best Translated Book Award Fiction Judge. Her work has appeared in The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Quarterly Conversation, Book Riot, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, The Rumpus and other online publications. She received her BFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York City. You can follow her on Twitter @booksexyreview and Instagram @taracheesman.