Do You Dream About a Torrid Affair?

Cocktail Sugar

Author: Goh Eun-joo

301 pages, 9,000 won, Publisher: Munidang.

The most page-turning story in the collection is “Yuri,” which tells the process of how a 20-year-old girl, Yuri, stands up in front of porn camera from being a second-time college entrance test applicant, who has no prospect in the future and with her house on a sale at auction. Yuri has been almost neglected by her parents, who are in a crisis, and she does not particularly hesitate in showing her naked body in front of the camcorder. It is because she is not attached to her future. She amplifies her intensity and finally becomes involved in acting in a “snuff film,” betting her life.

The original copy of “Yuri” was 700 pages long on manuscript. However, it is abridged into 200 pages, which contributes to the speedy development of the story. The character “Yuri” mysteriously has a strong sense of reality. It is interesting to listen to the story that a friend of Yuri, Jin-a, tells her. Jin-a is a mature young girl who saw the real face of the “matchmaking market” too early. She does one night stands quite often with a random wealthy man, who has a good body and dances well, (commonly called “Bread Pit”), but she is determined not to get married saying, “You know that he doesn’t have a prosperous future. He might be engaged in business dealing in goods some day. I cannot tolerate those girls, who are less charming and smart than me, bragging about their new class after marrying doctors and attorneys.”

“A Painting with Piece Patterns” and “Your Voice” deal with love affairs. The first story tells the voice of a young woman who is going to meet her lover’s wife. The second portrays a woman in her late 30’s who happens to talk frankly on the phone with her husband’s young and arousing love partner.

The title story “Cocktail Sugar” touches the reality of “multiple affairs” being tangled like chains among the men and women who throw themselves into love affairs. A cocktail sugar is a slim candy bar, for cocktail glasses, which easily melts in them. The cocktail sugar in this story is rotating, being handed over to the hands of this man and that woman. This story gives a slamming surprise to those men and women thinking, “It is so torrid lying on the bed with my affair, but I feel sorry for my wife (or husband).”

Experienced writer Jo Seong-gi, professor at Soongsil University, titled his commentary on the book “The Group Dance of Enormous Love Affairs” and paid attention to the plainspoken scenes described in this story collection.

Meanwhile, the woman involved in an affair in “A Painting with Piece Patterns” says that assembling the painting pieces of American artist Georgia O’Keeffe, who painted flowers that looked like a woman’s vulva, “If you see a sexual symbol in this picture, that means you are seeing the obsession within yourself.” The reality that the people in affairs feigning innocence might be the essence of the social conditions what writer Goh Eun-joo wanted to tell in her stories.

Ki-Tae Kwon kkt@donga.com