- Overview
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Your 4’33” is a novel that was inspired by John Cage’s composition, in which the musician does not play anything for four minutes and thirty-three seconds. Yi Gidong is man who reeks of despair and disappointment in a fiercely competitive society, while John Cage is an avant-garde genius who was recognized and acclaimed by the people around him. The novel juxtaposes the lives of these two men, creating a unique mood that portrays Yi Gidong’s sad, yet funny reality, more dramatically.
- Book Intro
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"The American avant-garde composer John Cage, who composed 4’33”, died in 1992. At the time, Yi Gidong was twelve years old, and he gave up on the piano after playing Czerny’s 100 Progressive Exercises because of the overdue lesson fees. Unlike John Cage’s father, who invented the submarine, Yi Gidong’s father was an odd head of the family who never worked hard to bring money home. Yi Gidong’s mother raised him by rolling gimbap all day. Yi Gidong, who didn’t have anything in particular that he wanted to be or achieve, didn’t give it much thought and just wrote “doctor” in the blank space where he was asked to write his dream. And in the space for the parents’ opinion, his mother wrote in big letters, “We agree.” But that was just a mother’s wish and had nothing to do with his actual grades, which averaged only 70 throughout his school days.
Yi Gidong’s life was insignificant even in his twenties. After a third attempt, he only just managed to enter the law department in university, but unable to land a job, he just scribbled. He revised half of the composition his father had written and won a spring literature contest, but the request for manuscripts never came. He married a civil servant, whom he had known from her days in Noryangjin where she prepared for the civil service exam, but their relationship slowly began to go awry as soon as their honeymoon ended. Then one day, like fate, Yi Gidong came across John Cage’s book while wandering between the bookshelves in the library. It was a thick hard cover that felt as avant-garde as John Cage himself. Yi Gidong wanted to understand this book, which seemed infinitely difficult to comprehend. He had a gut feeling--that the answer to the problem he was contemplating was inside the life that John Cage lived. For the first time, Yi Gidong decided to firmly trust his instincts and write a novel titled, Your 4’33”. Will Yi Gidong’s novel be able to draw the attention of the world again?
The recipient of the sixth Hwangsanbeol Award for Young Adult Literature, Your 4’33” is an original novel that juxtaposes the life of Yi Gidong, a man reeking of despair and disappointment in a fiercely competitive society with the life of John Cage, an avant-garde genius who was recognized and acclaimed by the people around him—all to portray the sad, yet funny, reality of Yi Gidong more dramatically."
- About the Author
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Lee Seosu
(English) Lee Seosu was born in Seoul in 1983. She made her writing debut when her short story “Used, or Vintage, or Saved” was selected as the winner of the 2014 Dong-a Ilbo New Writers Contest. She received the sixth Hwangsanbeol Young Adults Fiction Award for her novel Your Four Minutes and Thirty-Three Seconds, and she won the 22nd Lee Hyoseok Literary Award for her short story “Mijo’s Time.”