The Dwarf (Modern Korean Fiction)

The dark side of South KoreaÂ’s "economic miracle" emerges in The Dwarf, Cho Se-hÅ­iÂ’s enormously popular and critically acclaimed work. First published in 1978, it speaks to the painful social costs of reckless industrialization, even as it tellingly portrays the spiritual malaise of the newly rich and powerful and a working class subject to forces beyond its control. ChoÂ’s lean, clipped, deceptively simple style, the rapidly shifting points of view, terse dialogue, and subtle irony evoke the particularities of life in 1970s South Korea in the presence of global economic forces.

The desperate realities of life for the dwarf, the proverbial little guy upon whose back KoreaÂ’s economic transformation largely took place, are emotively rendered in twelve linked stories examining the lives of a laboring family, a family of the newly emerging middle class, and that of a wealthy industrialist. The stories have overlapping characters and situations: the murder of a swindler, a familyÂ’s eviction from a squatter settlement, the assassination of an important executive, the dwarfÂ’s fantasy of a planet where life is easier, his later suicide and the subsequent fate of his dispersed friends and family members.

This first English translation of The Dwarf by Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton succeeds remarkably in conveying both the emotive power and realism of the original Korean novel. South KoreaÂ’s economic troubles in the 1990s and the environmental degradation and food shortages in North Korea within the last decade have also reinforced this novelÂ’s relevance and importance in a new era.