{"id":67635,"date":"2025-10-11T09:14:11","date_gmt":"2025-10-11T09:14:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/67635\/"},"modified":"2025-10-11T09:14:11","modified_gmt":"2025-10-11T09:14:11","slug":"bora-chungs-ghosts-of-the-present","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/67635\/","title":{"rendered":"Bora Chung\u2019s ghosts of the present"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the recent wave of South Korean fiction crashing into the Anglophone\u00a0world, Bora Chung\u2019s restless, genre-based stories have been a highlight. Her collection of horror fantasies, Cursed Bunny<\/a>, was shortlisted for the International Booker \ufeffprize in 2022, and the science\u00a0fiction stories in Your Utopia<\/a> (2024) included one narrated by a sentient lift that couldn\u2019t understand why humans don\u2019t get their faulty parts replaced.<\/p>\n

Now with The Midnight Timetable, Chung has turned to ghost stories, loosely structured around an institute of haunted objects, and the results are more skittish than ever.<\/p>\n

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There are plenty of traditional(ish) spooky elements: a woman with a blue face and green teeth that appears as a succubus to another woman\u2019s husband; a series of silent,\u00a0staring sheep blocking a stairwell; a taxidermied seagull\ufeff that \u2013 seagull is as seagull does \u2013\u00a0continues to raid the fridge and bin even after death.<\/p>\n

But the terror in this book is as much sociopolitical as supernatural. In the opening story \ufeffYou Can\u2019t Come in Here\ufeff, Chan is a gay man whose struggles with his family\u2019s demands for conversion therapy have resulted in hallucinations. \u201cThe human body is our fundamental method of … relating to this world\u201d, and Chan\u2019s experiences lead to a \u201cbelief that his body was his burden to endure in this life\u201d. In \ufeffBlue Bird\ufeff, a fairy\ufefftale story of power and subjugation is connected to modern social pressures placed by men on women. The extreme oddness and narrative switchbacks \u2013 in one story, a murder happens literally on the turn of a page \u2013 mean the grounded, emotional moments hit all the harder when they come.<\/p>\n

The Midnight Timetable was \u201ca really fun amusement park of a book to work on\u201d, Chung says, but occasionally the fun isn\u2019t successfully transmitted to the reader. That opening story attempts too much\ufeff by introducing the institute and also cycling through different characters\u2019 stories without stopping for breath or going back to finish them. This approach, of handing the narrative from character to character, is much more successful in \ufeffHandkerchief, where two ageing brothers are driven to a frenzy of obsession \u2013 and a fistfight \u2013 over a handkerchief bequeathed by their mother.<\/p>\n

There are playful modern twists, too: in \ufeffCursed Sheep, a man risks his job by live-streaming from the haunted institute (viewers \ufeffkeep \u201cspamming the word \u2018FAKE\u2019 in the comments\u201d), while Chung toys with the current fetish for cute cat stories in \ufeffWhy Does the Cat. (Tip to cat lovers: skip ahead when you get to the line \u201cnailed the body \ufeff…\ufeff against the headboard\u201d.) But the story works too as an account of a man tortured by emotions so deep \ufeffhe can\u2019t name them, \ufeffonly follow them.<\/p>\n

The Midnight Timetable benefits from a translation by Chung\u2019s usual collaborator, Anton Hur, who brings clarity to even the strangest scenes. But the weak spot is the weirdly banal afterword where Chung explains the inspiration for the stories; it detracts from tales \ufeffthat should stand on their own. Which leads to an unusual recommendation: this is a good book, which you should stop reading before you get to the end.<\/p>\n

The Midnight Timetable by\u00a0Bora Chung, translated by Anton\u00a0Hur, is published by\u00a0Dialogue Books (\u00a314.99).\u00a0Order a copy from The Observer Shop<\/a> for \u00a313.49. Delivery charges may apply<\/p>\n

Editor\u2019s note: our recommendations are chosen independently by our journalists. The Observer may earn a small commission if a reader clicks a link and purchases a recommended product. This revenue helps support Observer journalism<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In the recent wave of South Korean fiction crashing into the Anglophone\u00a0world, Bora Chung\u2019s restless, genre-based stories have…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":67636,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[412,146,85,46],"class_list":["post-67635","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-books","tag-books","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-israel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67635","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=67635"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67635\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/67636"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=67635"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=67635"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=67635"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}