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A review by pushingdessy
Cursed Bunny by Bora Chung
dark
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? N/A
- Strong character development? N/A
- Loveable characters? N/A
- Diverse cast of characters? N/A
- Flaws of characters a main focus? N/A
4.0
🐇 “When we make our cursed fetishes, it’s important that they’re pretty.”
My impromptu pick for Women in Translation Month was “Cursed Bunny”, an anthology of short stories by Korean author Bora Chung, translated to English by Anton Hur, which I’d heard a lot about.
The ten stories that comprise this collection felt like a mix of urban legend and folk tale: disturbing, haunting, fantastical, fabulistic, some of them told as if recounting oral history. They deal with women’s bodies, with the weight of loneliness, with human greed, with ghosts and revenge. All of this made me think of Carmen María Machado’s “Her body and other parties”.
It was interesting because I could feel that I was reading a translation. Not that it was a bad translation, which I couldn’t say since I don’t know Korean, or that it was bad writing, but it was a sort of concise type of writing that emphasizes that feeling of urban-folk legend. I wonder if it reads the same way in Korean.
If I had to pick a favourite, I’d say “The head” is a solid opener, but I enjoyed all of them - although if I had to pick my least favourite, it’d be “Scars”, the longest in the anthology.
My impromptu pick for Women in Translation Month was “Cursed Bunny”, an anthology of short stories by Korean author Bora Chung, translated to English by Anton Hur, which I’d heard a lot about.
The ten stories that comprise this collection felt like a mix of urban legend and folk tale: disturbing, haunting, fantastical, fabulistic, some of them told as if recounting oral history. They deal with women’s bodies, with the weight of loneliness, with human greed, with ghosts and revenge. All of this made me think of Carmen María Machado’s “Her body and other parties”.
It was interesting because I could feel that I was reading a translation. Not that it was a bad translation, which I couldn’t say since I don’t know Korean, or that it was bad writing, but it was a sort of concise type of writing that emphasizes that feeling of urban-folk legend. I wonder if it reads the same way in Korean.
If I had to pick a favourite, I’d say “The head” is a solid opener, but I enjoyed all of them - although if I had to pick my least favourite, it’d be “Scars”, the longest in the anthology.