Cursed Bunny: Shortlisted for the 2022 International Booker Prize

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RASCOE: Yeah. Well, that definitely happened in that story. You know, in a lot of your stories, I found a theme of women and the autonomy over their bodies and kind of, like, the horror and the tension that can come from not only just, like, what your body creates, intentionally or unintentionally, and the way society reacts to it. Like, what were you trying to get at with some of those stories? BC:I trust Anton completely, and I leave him alone when he works. The result is always brilliant, as you can see. In “Goodbye My Love,” Anton gave Model One a gender because the English language requires it. So Anton made Model One a she. Model one is a robot, so by principle it doesn’t have gender and Model One as a woman kind of surprised me. It gave the story an undertone of a queer narrative, and I love it.

RASCOE: But the thing I also thought was that men could decide whether they wanted to be a father or not, whereas the woman in this case who was pregnant just had to deal with it. I mean, obviously, can get an abortion or whatever, but in this case, the woman was having the baby, and she didn't have a choice in that. She couldn't decide whether she wanted to be pregnant or not in this story, right? Whereas the men were able to say, I don't know what I want to do. Right? One of the most captivating short stories that describes the complex emotions of selfishness, greed, and revenge is titled, “Cursed Bunny.” The story is told through the lens of a grandson whose grandfather repeatedly tells him the story of a “cursed bunny.” The story revolves around a cursed bunny lamp that was made for the grandfather’s friend. According to the grandfather, his friend’s distillery company was ruined by a greedy competitor who spread lies about their drinks. The grandfather explains that “they claimed that anyone who drank [their drinks] would become blind, lame, or even fatally poisoned. Sales for my grandfather’s friend took a nosedive.” With the very real risk of being called a party pooper, a spoil-sport, old-fashioned and worse, I think Bora Chung's short story collection is bitter, sour, cruel, depressing, and yes ultimately evil. I took the first story seriously thinking that she was making a strong comparison between the haves and have nots - but by the end I was laughing because of the un-erasable image of that woman emerging from the toilet, with her wet hair hanging over her face - The Ring, horror film 2002 - anyone? Ok, so she's climbing out of a tv. Haven’t finished reading: Janusz Zajdel was a Polish nuclear physicist and a SF writer with an amazing dystopian vision. I started reading his novel entitled Van Troff’s Cylinder ( Cylinder Van Troffa, 1980) but then I started translating other Polish books at the same time and got busy with deadline etc and had to stop reading and focus on the translation first. This happens all the time. But I was translating Polish books at the time so Zajdel would’ve understood, I hope. Should really finish the Cylinder though. There is absolutely no reason this needed to be this damn long. And all this misery for what? He overcomes the evil so easily and then the story just ends and I am confused and unsatisfied.Godammnit! I liked this one. It's about greed and how everything has a price. I was gasping at the twists in this short story. So I'm guessing I need to explain my use of Duchamp's sculpture in connection with Bora Chung's book, Cursed Bunny. This book is on the shortlist for the International Booker prize 2022; with I believe 50,000 GBP of prize money. More importantly, however, a panel of judges have taken their time to evaluate and consider this book seriously, for presumably, its literary and artistic merits. CHUNG: It's less dangerous if you are aware that you're never going to understand this. I think Isaac Asimov said something to that effect. But as long as we believe that we are gods, that we've created this, so this thing will always listen to me and do as I say, then we are walking into deeper trouble.

She got angry. “I never gave the likes of you permission to live in my toilet. I never even created the likes of you in the first place, so stop calling me your mother. Leave before I call the exterminators.” a bunch of my favorite subjects in one: ghosts, sadness, the meaning of life, people-watching, lovers. Okay, allllllllright. This one had potential. It is eerie, atmospheric, and unsettling. Confusing though. But I actually really enjoyed it........dammnit.Seminary Offsets Honors the Literary History of Chicago’s South Side with the Reissue of “Divine Days” South Korean novelist Bora Chung’s first translated work, the short story collection “ Cursed Bunny,” is an example of the new amalgamated norm. Drawing from Korean folk tale and Chung’s expertise as a Slavic literature professor, the narratives here shamble and ooze across a porous divide between highbrow absurdism and lowbrow jump scare. The balance changes from story to story, and sometimes the genre conventions feel too pat, as genre conventions will. But the more predictable moments set you up to miss a crucial step and fall right into the abyss when Chung gets weird.