I Have the Right to Destroy Myself by Young-ha Kim, Chi-Young Kim (Translator)

From the Publisher

In the fast-paced, high-urban landscape of Seoul, C and K are brothers who have fallen in love with the same woman—Se-yeon—who tears at both of them as they all try desperately to find real connection in an atomized world. A spectral, nameless narrator haunts the edges of their lives as he tells of his work helping the lost and hurting find escape through suicide. Dreamlike and beautiful, the South Korea brought forth in this novel is cinematic in its urgency and its reflection of contemporary life everywhere—far beyond the boundaries of the Korean peninsula.  Recalling the emotional tension of Milan Kundera and the existential anguish of Bret Easton Ellis, I Have the Right to Destroy Myself achieves its author’s greatest wish—to show Korean literature as part of an international tradition. Young-ha Kim is a young master, the leading literary voice of his generation.

Publishers Weekly

Korean novelist Kim's tantalizing 1996 debut novel concerns a calculating, urbane young man who makes a business of helping his clients commit suicide. The narrator's favorite painting, Jacques-Louis David's The Death of Marat, encapsulates his outlook-to be "detached and cold," an approach reflected in his account of a recent client who was romantically involved with two brothers (called C and K). The woman, Se-yeon, is a young, spacey, lollipop-sucking drifter who first hangs out with K before bedding C. Cab-driver K and video artist C become obsessed with Se-Yeon, who looks (to them) like Gustave Klimt's Judith. Judith, as they subsequently refer to her, later wanders off into a snowstorm, never to be seen by the brothers again. However, in this eerie, elliptical narrative, Judith reappears as the narrator's client. Moreover, Judith morphs into other objects of desire, such as a woman from Hong Kong the narrator meets in Vienna and an elusive performance artist named Mimi whom C films. Kim's work is a self-conscious literary exploration of truth, death, desire and identity, and though it traffics in racy themes, it never devolves into base voyeurism. (July)

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Los Angeles Times

"Kim's novel is art built upon art. His style is reminiscent of Kafka's and also relies on images of paintings (Jacques-Louis David's "The Death of Marat," Gustav Klimt's "Judith") and film (Jim Jarmusch's "Stranger Than Paradise"). The philosophy -- life is worthless and small -- reminds us of Camus and Sartre, risky territory for a young writer. Such heady influences can topple a novel. But Kim has the advantage of the urban South Korean landscape. Fast cars, sex with lollipops and weather fronts from Siberia lend a unique flavor to good old-fashioned nihilism. Think of it as Korean noir."

Booklist

"As bleak, chilling, and economically written as Stephen Crane's 1890s classics Maggie and George's Mother, though with characters miles up the economic scale from Crane's, Kim's deadpan, elliptical story is even more like the enigmatic love (?) stories of Taiwanese filmmaker Tsai Ming-liang, whose work must be watched as raptly as Kim's must be read. Mesmerizing."

Newark Star Ledger

"Stylish .... Here are all the familiar tropes of the late coming-of-age novel: desire, self-destruction, boredom, and the inability of sex to extinguish all of the above. And yet this book is anything but predictable.... "I Have the Right to Destroy Myself" is also a work of resistance, but rather an existential one. Scenes wind down in an atmosphere of menacing ennui to a soundtrack of Leonard Cohen tunes.... Amazingly, this short novel never becomes a decadent love letter to suicide, or an excuse to drop a cluster of hipster signifiers. In fact, it reminds of a line written by French poet Baudelaire, himself a huge fan of "The Death of Marat," and a clear influence on this book. "Boredom," he wrote, "is pain spread out over time." Numbed into a state where they can't express their pain with words, C. and K. do nothing. Gently, this novel makes sure we feel their loss for them." -- Newark Star Ledger

Kirkus

"The interactions, thoughts and fantasies of four protagonists interweave in a dreamlike narrative that eschews chronology and sequence, examining the role of "morbid desires, imprisoned deep in the unconscious" in each's experience. [T]he author is a stylish, inventive writer who builds eerie momentum out of cryptic conversations and deliberately imprecise characterizations. The brothers are both vividly differentiated and shown to possess similarly self-destructive traits. And the woman "a kind of Eternal Feminine temptress smiling and beguiling her way to oblivion”twirls around the text like a spinning jewel, appearing as an unresponsive drifter named Se-yeon, an avatar of the biblical heroine (and murderess) Judith as depicted by artist Gustav Klimt. The book's dark doings are efficiently framed by descriptive allusions to famous paintings that celebrate death, and by the narrator's assured orchestration of its siren call. Pretty sick, but absorbing. Noir with a piquant exotic twist." 

PW

"Korean novelist Kim's tantalizing 1996 debut novel concerns a calculating, urbane young man who makes a business of helping his clients commit suicide.[An] eerie, elliptical narrative. Kim's work is a self-conscious literary exploration of truth, death, desire and identity, and though it traffics in racy themes, it never devolves into base voyeurism." -- PW  

Han Ong

"Mr. Kim's writing is tense, elemental, tangy. Like Georges Simenon, his keen engagement with human perversity yields an abundance of thrills as well as chills (and for good measure, a couple of memorable laughs). This is a real find." —author of Fixer Chao

Kirkus Reviews

Alienation, ennui and self-destruction are perceived as artistic creations in this icy 1996 novel, its Korean author's first in English translation. The interactions, thoughts and fantasies of four protagonists interweave in a dreamlike narrative that eschews chronology and sequence, examining the role of "morbid desires, imprisoned deep in the unconscious" in each's experience. A seemingly responsible video artist (C) contends with his brother (K), a cabdriver hooked on the thrill of "velocity," for the attention of a mysteriously beautiful young woman who responds sexually to both, but who can choose neither man nor anything else to care about. Observing their several encounters is the unnamed narrator, an emotionless manipulator who offers to his "clients" the "service" of escaping the banality of existence. The endorsement of suicide is itself banality incarnate, as are such gloomy pronouncements as the woman's petulant complaint that "people who can't kill can't ever truly love someone." But the author is a stylish, inventive writer who builds eerie momentum out of cryptic conversations and deliberately imprecise characterizations. The brothers are both vividly differentiated and shown to possess similarly self-destructive traits. And the woman-a kind of Eternal Feminine temptress smiling and beguiling her way to oblivion-twirls around the text like a spinning jewel, appearing as an unresponsive drifter named Se-yeon, an avatar of the biblical heroine (and murderess) Judith as depicted by artist Gustav Klimt. The book's dark doings are efficiently framed by descriptive allusions to famous paintings that celebrate death, and by the narrator's assured orchestration of its siren call.Pretty sick, but absorbing. Noir with a piquant exotic twist.

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part i
the death of marat
 
I’M LOOKING at Jacques-Louis David’s 1793 oil painting, The Death of Marat, printed in an art book. The Jacobin revolutionary Jean-Paul Marat lies murdered in his bath. His head is wrapped in a towel, like a turban, and his hand, draped alongside the tub, holds a pen. Marat has expired—bloodied—nestled between the colors of white and green. The work exudes calm and quiet. You can almost hear a requiem. The fatal knife lies abandoned at the bottom of the canvas.

           I’ve already tried to make a copy of this painting several times. The most difficult part is Marat’s expression; he always comes out looking too sedate. In David’s Marat, you can see neither the dejection of a young revolutionary in the wake of a sudden attack nor the relief of a man who has escaped life’s suffering. His Marat is peaceful but pained, filled with hatred but also with understanding. Through a dead man’s expression David manages to realize all of our conflicting innermost emotions. Seeing this painting for the first time, your eyes initially rest on Marat’s face. But his face doesn’t tell you anything, so your gaze moves in one of two directions: either toward the hand clutching the letter or the hand hanging limply outside of the tub. Even in death, he has kept hold of the letter and the pen. Marat was killed by a woman who had written him earlier, as he was drafting a reply to her letter. The pen Marat grips into death injects tension into the calm and serenity of the scene. We should all emulate David. An artist’spassion shouldn’t create passion. An artist’s supreme virtue is to be detached and cold.

           Marat’s assassin, Charlotte Corday, lost her life at the guillotine. A young Girondin, Corday decided that Marat must be eliminated. It was July 13, 1793; she was twenty-five years old. Arrested immediately after the incident, Corday was beheaded four days later, on July 17.

           Robespierre’s reign of terror was set in motion after Marat’s death. David understood the Jacobins’ aesthetic imperative: A revolution cannot progress without the fuel of terror. With time that relationship inverts: The revolution presses forward for the sake of terror. Like an artist, the man creating terror should be detached, cold-blooded. He must keep in mind that the energy of the terror he releases can consume him. Robespierre died at the guillotine.
 
I close my art book, get up, and take a bath. I always wash meticulously on the days I work. After my bath, I shave carefully and go to the library, where I look for clients and scan through potentially helpful materials. This is slow, dull work, but I plod through it. Sometimes I don’t have a single client for months. But I can survive for half a year if I find just one, so I don’t mind putting long hours into research.

           Usually I read history books or travel guides at the library. A single city contains tens of thousands of lives and hundreds of years of history, as well as the evidence of their interweaving. In travel guides, all of this is compressed into several lines. For example, an introduction to Paris starts like this:
 Far from just a secular place, Paris is the holy land of religious, political, and artistic freedom, alternately brandishing that freedom and secretly yearning for more of it. Known for its spirit of tolerance, this city has been the refuge for thinkers, artists, and revolutionaries like Robespierre, Curie, Wilde, Sartre, Picasso, Ho Chi Minh, and Khomeini, along with many other unusual figures. Paris has fine examples of excellent 19th-century urban planning, and like its music, art, and theater, its architecture encompasses everything from the Middle Ages to the avant-garde, sometimes even beyond the avant-garde. With its history, innovations, culture, and civilization, Paris is a necessity in the world: If Paris did not exist, we would have to invent her.
 
           One word more about Paris would be superfluous. Such succinctness is why I enjoy reading travel guides and history books. People who don’t know how to summarize have no dignity. Neither do people who needlessly drag on their messy lives. They who don’t know the beauty of simplification, of pruning away the unnecessary, die without ever comprehending the true meaning of life.

           I always take a trip when I’m paid at the completion of a job. This time, I will go to Paris. These few lines in the travel guide are enough to pique my curiosity. I will spend the days reading Henry Miller or Oscar Wilde or sketching Ingres at the Louvre. The man who reads travel guides on a trip is a bore. I read novels when I’m traveling, but I don’t read them in Seoul. Novels are food for the leftover hours of life, the in-between times, the moments of waiting.

           At the library, I flip through magazines first. Of all the articles, the interviews interest me the most. If I’m lucky, I find clients in them. Reporters, armed with middlebrow, cheap sensibilities, hide my potential clients’ characteristics between the lines. They never ask questions like, “Have you ever felt the urge to kill someone?” And obviously they never wonder, “How do you feel when you see blood?” They don’t show the interviewees David’s or Delacroix’s paintings and ask them their thoughts. Instead, the interviews are filled with meaningless chatter. But they can’t fool me; I catch the glimmer of possibility in their empty words. I unearth clues from the types of music they prefer, the family histories they sometimes reveal, the books that hit a nerve, the artists they love. People unconsciously want to reveal their inner urges. They are waiting for someone like me.

           For example, a client once told me that she liked van Gogh. I asked her whether she liked his landscapes or his self-portraits. She hesitated, then told me she preferred his self-portraits. I always take a close look at those who lose themselves in self-portraits. They are solitary souls, prone to introspection, who have really grappled with their existence. And they know such introspection, though painful, is secretly exhilarating. And if someone asks me the kind of question I myself might pose, I can tell he’s lonely. But not all lonely people are suitable clients.

           After browsing through magazines, I look through newspapers. I read everything carefully, from obituaries to want ads—especially ads seeking a particular kind of person. I read the business section as well. I focus on articles about once-prosperous companies on the brink of bankruptcy. I also pay close attention to the fluctuations of the stock market, because stocks are the first indicators of social change. In the culture section, I note current trends in the art scene and popular kinds of music. Of course, new books are also a subject of interest. Reading these articles helps me figure out my potential clients’ current tastes. My knowledge of their favorite music, art, and books will help the conversation flow freely.

           Sometimes, leaving the library, I stop by Insa-dong to look at art or head toward some music megastores to buy CDs. If I’m lucky, I find a potential client roaming the galleries. I look for people absorbed in the thoroughly deliberate study of a piece of art, people who never once glance at their watches—even on a Saturday afternoon. These people have nowhere else to go; they have no one to meet. And the paintings that enthrall them, that hold them rooted completely in one place for a long time, inadvertently betray their viewers’ innermost desires.

           In the evening I head to my office on the seventh floor of a run-down building downtown. I only have a phone, desk, and computer in my office. I never meet anyone here. I don’t even have to see my landlord because I pay my rent online. When I get there, I turn the answering machine off and wait for the phone to ring. By 1:00 a.m., I usually receive around twenty calls. They call responding to my ad in the paper: “We listen to your problems.” Having read this simple sentence, they wait until nightfall to dial. I talk until early in the morning to people with various problems: a girl being raped by her father, a gay man about to be conscripted into the army, a woman cheating on her boyfriend, a wife beaten by her husband. I hear stories I’d never discover in the library, bookstore, or Insa-dong galleries during the day. This is how I find the majority of my clients.

           After a few minutes, I can figure out anyone’s level of education, likes and dislikes, and economic circumstances. I can detect and select a budding client with this kind of information. I like having the power to choose my clients.

           But there are pitfalls. The very fact that callers still have the will to converse with someone means they haven’t despaired deeply enough to enlist my services. So I take a different tack from that of ordinary counselors, who listen to their stories but don’t offer solutions. I listen to them only until I can figure them out, then ply them with my advice. There’s no point in continuing to listen to the girl whose father rapes and beats her every night. All I can tell the girl, who is already seventeen, is that she should run away. But ordinary counselors tell her to stay, to suck it up, and to call social organizations or the police for help. These counselors are ignoring the essence of the problem and the simplicity of the solution. It’s not as if this girl doesn’t know what she should do.

© Young-ha Kim and Munhakdongne Publishing Co., Ltd., Korea, 1996
English translation copyright © 2007 by Chi-Young Kim
 
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
 
Requests for permission to make copies of any part of the work should be submitted online at harcourt.com/contact or mailed to the following address: Permissions Department, Harcourt, Inc., 6277 Sea Harbor Drive, Orlando, Florida 32887-6777.

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I Have the Right to Destroy Myself

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By Kim, Young-ha

Harvest Books

Copyright © 2007 Kim, Young-ha
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780156030809

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part i
the death of marat
 
I’M LOOKING at Jacques-Louis David’s 1793 oil painting, The Death of Marat, printed in an art book. The Jacobin revolutionary Jean-Paul Marat lies murdered in his bath. His head is wrapped in a towel, like a turban, and his hand, draped alongside the tub, holds a pen. Marat has expired—bloodied—nestled between the colors of white and green. The work exudes calm and quiet. You can almost hear a requiem. The fatal knife lies abandoned at the bottom of the canvas.
           I’ve already tried to make a copy of this painting several times. The most difficult part is Marat’s expression; he always comes out looking too sedate. In David’s Marat, you can see neither the dejection of a young revolutionary in the wake of a sudden attack nor the relief of a man who has escaped life’s suffering. His Marat is peaceful but pained, filled with hatred but also with understanding. Through a dead man’s expression David manages to realize all of our conflicting innermost emotions. Seeing this painting for the first time, your eyes initially rest on Marat’s face. But his face doesn’t tell you anything, so your gaze moves in one of two directions: either toward the handclutching the letter or the hand hanging limply outside of the tub. Even in death, he has kept hold of the letter and the pen. Marat was killed by a woman who had written him earlier, as he was drafting a reply to her letter. The pen Marat grips into death injects tension into the calm and serenity of the scene. We should all emulate David. An artist’s passion shouldn’t create passion. An artist’s supreme virtue is to be detached and cold.
           Marat’s assassin, Charlotte Corday, lost her life at the guillotine. A young Girondin, Corday decided that Marat must be eliminated. It was July 13, 1793; she was twenty-five years old. Arrested immediately after the incident, Corday was beheaded four days later, on July 17.
           Robespierre’s reign of terror was set in motion after Marat’s death. David understood the Jacobins’ aesthetic imperative: A revolution cannot progress without the fuel of terror. With time that relationship inverts: The revolution presses forward for the sake of terror. Like an artist, the man creating terror should be detached, cold-blooded. He must keep in mind that the energy of the terror he releases can consume him. Robespierre died at the guillotine.
 
I close my art book, get up, and take a bath. I always wash meticulously on the days I work. After my bath, I shave carefully and go to the library, where I look for clients and scan through potentially helpful materials. This is slow, dull work, but I plod through it. Sometimes I don’t have a single client for months. But I can survive for half a year if I find just one, so I don’t mind putting long hours into research.
           Usually I read history books or travel guides at the library. A single city contains tens of thousands of lives and hundreds of years of history, as well as the evidence of their interweaving. In travel guides, all of this is compressed into several lines. For example, an introduction to Paris starts like this:
 Far from just a secular place, Paris is the holy land of religious, political, and artistic freedom, alternately brandishing that freedom and secretly yearning for more of it. Known for its spirit of tolerance, this city has been the refuge for thinkers, artists, and revolutionaries like Robespierre, Curie, Wilde, Sartre, Picasso, Ho Chi Minh, and Khomeini, along with many other unusual figures. Paris has fine examples of excellent 19th-century urban planning, and like its music, art, and theater, its architecture encompasses everything from the Middle Ages to the avant-garde, sometimes even beyond the avant-garde. With its history, innovations, culture, and civilization, Paris is a necessity in the world: If Paris did not exist, we would have to invent her.
 
           One word more about Paris would be superfluous. Such succinctness is why I enjoy reading travel guides and history books. People who don’t know how to summarize have no dignity. Neither do people who needlessly drag on their messy lives. They who don’t know the beauty of simplification, of pruning away the unnecessary, die without ever comprehending the true meaning of life.
            I always take a trip when I’m paid at the completion of a job. This time, I will go to Paris. These few lines in the travel guide are enough to pique my curiosity. I will spend the days reading Henry Miller or Oscar Wilde or sketching Ingres at the Louvre. The man who reads travel guides on a trip is a bore. I read novels when I’m traveling, but I don’t read them in Seoul. Novels are food for the leftover hours of life, the in-between times, the moments of waiting.
           At the library, I flip through magazines first. Of all the articles, the interviews interest me the most. If I’m lucky, I find clients in them. Reporters, armed with middlebrow, cheap sensibilities, hide my potential clients’ characteristics between the lines. They never ask questions like, “Have you ever felt the urge to kill someone?” And obviously they never wonder, “How do you feel when you see blood?” They don’t show the interviewees David’s or Delacroix’s paintings and ask them their thoughts. Instead, the interviews are filled with meaningless chatter. But they can’t fool me; I catch the glimmer of possibility in their empty words. I unearth clues from the types of music they prefer, the family histories they sometimes reveal, the books that hit a nerve, the artists they love. People unconsciously want to reveal their inner urges. They are waiting for someone like me.
           For example, a client once told me that she liked van Gogh. I asked her whether she liked his landscapes or his self-portraits. She hesitated, then told me she preferred his self-portraits. I always take a close look at those who lose themselves in self-portraits. They are solitary souls, prone to introspection, who have really grappled with their existence. And they know such introspection, though painful, is secretly exhilarating. And if someone asks me the kind of question I myself might pose, I can tell he’s lonely. But not all lonely people are suitable clients.
           After browsing through magazines, I look through newspapers. I read everything carefully, from obituaries to want ads—especially ads seeking a particular kind of person. I read the business section as well. I focus on articles about once-prosperous companies on the brink of bankruptcy. I also pay close attention to the fluctuations of the stock market, because stocks are the first indicators of social change. In the culture section, I note current trends in the art scene and popular kinds of music. Of course, new books are also a subject of interest. Reading these articles helps me figure out my potential clients’ current tastes. My knowledge of their favorite music, art, and books will help the conversation flow freely.
           Sometimes, leaving the library, I stop by Insa-dong to look at art or head toward some music megastores to buy CDs. If I’m lucky, I find a potential client roaming the galleries. I look for people absorbed in the thoroughly deliberate study of a piece of art, people who never once glance at their watches—even on a Saturday afternoon. These people have nowhere else to go; they have no one to meet. And the paintings that enthrall them, that hold them rooted completely in one place for a long time, inadvertently betray their viewers’ innermost desires.
           In the evening I head to my office on the seventh floor of a run-down building downtown. I only have a phone, desk, and computer in my office. I never meet anyone here. I don’t even have to see my landlord because I pay my rent online. When I get there, I turn the answering machine off and wait for the phone to ring. By 1:00 a.m., I usually receive around twenty calls. They call responding to my ad in the paper: “We listen to your problems.” Having read this simple sentence, they wait until nightfall to dial. I talk until early in the morning to people with various problems: a girl being raped by her father, a gay man about to be conscripted into the army, a woman cheating on her boyfriend, a wife beaten by her husband. I hear stories I’d never discover in the library, bookstore, or Insa-dong galleries during the day. This is how I find the majority of my clients.
           After a few minutes, I can figure out anyone’s level of education, likes and dislikes, and economic circumstances. I can detect and select a budding client with this kind of information. I like having the power to choose my clients.
           But there are pitfalls. The very fact that callers still have the will to converse with someone means they haven’t despaired deeply enough to enlist my services. So I take a different tack from that of ordinary counselors, who listen to their stories but don’t offer solutions. I listen to them only until I can figure them out, then ply them with my advice. There’s no point in continuing to listen to the girl whose father rapes and beats her every night. All I can tell the girl, who is already seventeen, is that she should run away. But ordinary counselors tell her to stay, to suck it up, and to call social organizations or the police for help. These counselors are ignoring the essence of the problem and the simplicity of the solution. It’s not as if this girl doesn’t know what she should do.
© Young-ha Kim and Munhakdongne Publishing Co., Ltd., Korea, 1996
English translation copyright © 2007 by Chi-Young Kim
 
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
 
Requests for permission to make copies of any part of the work should be submitted online at www.harcourt.com/contact or mailed to the following address: Permissions Department, Harcourt, Inc., 6277 Sea Harbor Drive, Orlando, Florida 32887-6777.

Continues...

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