- Overview
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Hwang Hyunjin’s novel Will of the Moon deals with the uneasiness and uncomfortable feelings those who are at the end of relationships would have, leading the readers to look at the other side of their life and relationships that they have kept.
- Book Intro
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An old couple strolls along a quite large lake. A man walks ahead and a woman follows him, but he does not slow down. The distance between the two grows wider. How many couples truly know the exact reason they break up? The man and the woman soon split up. The woman is a novelist who is eking out a living by writing an interview script for a corporate newspaper after publishing a book a few years ago. Upon breaking up with her boyfriend, she meets an interviewee “Egg” who became a singer through the audition program and yet whose unhappy family history has been more widely known than his singing.
Orphan. Waiter at a karaoke bar. Owner of a cart bar. A boy who was abandoned upon birth. That was Egg who had undergone an unfortunate childhood and lived his life in the backstreet bars and adult entertainment districts. During the interview with him, she gets to know about his life story and misfortune that he has endured. But she finds it difficult to believe in him. The stories he tells her sound just like a movie. And his whole body is covered with scars and burn marks. She finds it difficult to take these traces of violence and abuse as though they are nothing.
But why does she feel drawn to the past than the present? Would she have tried to compare miserable Egg with her ex-boyfriend Handu and to justify their parting? Determining to be separated from Handu by being connected to Egg is probably one of the processes that everyone goes through when they break up with their lover. Interview requires interviewees to summarize their life in a short limited time. And when we are requested to summary our own lives, we cannot help but to think of unhappy moments in the past. Because of the long journey we have taken through the tunnel of past memories always leads us back to the past.
And every break up weighs heavy on our mind. Yet, it is a small ritual we perform to get rid of the memories, which end up erasing the memories of our ex-boyfriends or girlfriends. The woman in Will of the Moon deletes her ex-boyfriend from her memory upon parting with him. Then she learns that she can never step forward without looking into and forgetting her past.
- About the Author
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Hwang Hyunjin
- Award
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- Recommendation
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- Selection
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- Bestseller Rank
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