As pandemic literature carves out a space of its own in contemporary letters, such writings unveil what is seemingly opaque or inscrutable about the presumed normalcy of “the before times.” In our Book Club selection for May, To the Warm Horizon, Choi Jin-young sketches a fragmentary, kaleidoscopic tale of survival and longing in the aftermath of a global catastrophe triggered by illness. The focus, however, is not on contagion itself. Instead, it falls on the variety of ways in which human interactions unfold within a more general dynamic of contrasting forces: fear and hope, reason and unreason, cruelty and love.
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To the Warm Horizon by Choi Jin-young, translated from the Korean by Soje, Honford Star, 2021
Among the many side effects of the pandemic, we have witnessed a global reawakening of the taste for narratives of contagion, (post-)apocalyptic scenarios, and disaster fiction. If in March 2020, readers rushed to revisit the classics (Boccaccio’s Decameron, Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year, or Camus’s The Plague), the public quickly moved to explore newer works as the pandemic stretched on, such as Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (2003) and Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven (2014). The early months of 2021 came with an entirely new crop of contemporary writing, whose publication in English translation was likely encouraged—if not sped up—by the timeliness of their subject matter. Choi Jin-young’s To the Warm Horizon, published originally in Korean in 2017 and in Soje’s translation in 2021, is an example of the newly acquired popularity of these viral themes.
An unnamed virus serves only as a distant background for the five first-person narrators whose voices echo one another in this book, wherein the disastrous toll of hundreds of thousands of victims a day has decimated the population of the globe in a matter of days, setting in motion massive flows of refugees headed for an ever-distant promise of warmth and safety lurking on the horizon. Not much is disclosed about the disease itself, except that it provokes a rapid death; Choi Jin-young focuses instead on the possibilities for love and caring connections in a time of societal breakdown and civilizational disarray.
Countering the entropy of a world in dissolution, the narrative stitches together twenty kaleidoscopic chapters, in which five nomadic voices each offer their own experience of the events. The fragments are titled after their narrators and read like curated journal entries, varying in length and intensity. Amongst the speakers, Dori and Jina are given the most depth and contour; they speak for themselves as queer women, and their burgeoning romantic relationship is at the core of the novel. Ryu is the spokesperson for her family’s story, while Joy and Gunji are episodic storytellers whose accounts center on their own desires.
Soje’s English translation flows effortlessly, managing to convey the sense of linguistic foreignness encountered by the small groups of Korean refugees as they cross paths with larger crowds of international nomads on endless Russian roads. The comedy and discomfort of the cultural mixing illustrate how effectively disasters render borders absurd. The puzzle is further enriched by references from the pre-pandemic world (think Transformers, The Sixth Sense, Italian opera, or Google Maps), granting an aura of nostalgic cohesion to the wanderers. Nevertheless, communication difficulties arise at every step. Dori and Joy talk through sign language, Jina sees “red flags fluttering with text I couldn’t understand.” Ryu tries to speak to Dori in Japanese and in English, the latter being comically rendered for phonetic accuracy (“A-im peurom Koria. Wheo al yu peurom?”), before reverting to a Korean dialect.
The novel relies heavily on sensorial perceptions, and places significant emphasis on the inner lives of the characters. It strikes a variety of emotional chords, with an insistence and an overtness that arrest narrative development. The reader is instead taken on a rollercoaster ride from shock, anguish, and horror, to pity and compassion, or compassion fatigue. The characters are meanwhile embedded in a relational network—guilt-ridden parenthood, protective sisterhood, lesbian romance, unrequited love, and dysfunctional marriage—emphasizing the ethics of care in an environment of emotional hyper-saturation.
Fleeting observations resonate with current hopes and anxieties: “Was the virus still mutating? I’d heard that even if they created a vaccine, it wouldn’t be able to keep up with the mutation rate. Someone must still be working on it though.” Although the people in the novel are already past the informational overload, the doom scrolling, and the fake news—the disaster having rendered the internet and smartphones unusable—these tropes are all mentioned as symptoms of the pandemic in its early stages:
News outlets and social media overflowed with information after the virus struck, just as they had before. The live updates refreshed too quickly. I could not distinguish what was real from what was fake. Certain pieces of information, inflated by rumor and conspiracy, prevailed and turned the real disaster into a joke. So we grew numb. Concern soon cooled to indifference, and we shrugged it all off. Oh, this again. I’m sure it’ll be fine eventually.
When not downright anesthetized with either rage or indifference, the humanity portrayed here is vulnerable to mood swings and contradictory feelings. It is undecidedly “scared and bored of being scared,” against a background of deserted land: “The feeling of sitting in an empty playground, swinging back and forth between this is fine and is this fine.” Introspection leads to the admittance the human psyche’s immense complexity: responsibility and madness coexist in the affective landscape of the pandemic. Although even laughter and playfulness are frowned upon by secondary characters as indecent in a world well off its hinges, the five protagonists still turn for survival to art, love, and the calm of unchanging natural world.
Brief flashbacks illuminate the characters’ pasts, endowing them with sufficient motivation for their present behaviors or actions. A strange spatialization of this past occurs (or is it a temporalization of space?) when “Korea” comes to signify more than their homeland; it becomes a name for the pre-pandemic times. There is constant comparison with “the before times” and an equally constant uncertainty about how the world will look “after”—all sounding very familiar to the 2021 reader. The uncertainty is echoed chapter after chapter, as all the accounts contain a flurry of rhetorical questions: “If the bunkers were real, and they were occupied by people living honorably during this disaster, then what kind of people were they? If they were to repopulate Earth, would they create a different world?” The explicit repetition of such questions reflects a well-known truth: that dystopias, just like utopias, are ultimately radical pretexts for lucid reflection on what we accept as a “normal” state of affairs, be it at a personal or global scale. Ryu acknowledges this as she registers her own change in attitude towards her family: “[In Korea,] I shelved precious people. Because there was always tomorrow.”
Stylistically, the novel is at its best during its poetic interludes. Melancholic descriptions fulfill this function, punctuating the fast-paced unfolding of the minimalist plot. The translation does justice to several surprising comparisons—rhetorical figures to which the author seems to give preference: “I felt like I’d just cracked open a forty-five-volume martial arts novel after years of putting it off.” Despite the realist and sometimes gory storytelling, there is a dreamlike (although nightmarish) quality of the prose that gives a spectral consistency to the characters: “I have this recurring dream, and it’s about the end of humanity. [. . .] Can we really call it extinction if we stay ghosts forever?” The five silhouettes remain somewhat vague, individualized only through the roles they fulfill relative to one another: as mother, father, sister, friend, lover.
In an interview with Soje, Choi Jin-young notes that, for this book, she found inspiration in the nomadic love story from Christophe Bataille’s Annam, as well as in the father-son relationship from Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. She also admits, candidly: “One of the things I set out to do while writing this novel was to make it happy.” Despite the comforting epilogue and prologue that reassuringly frames this narrative from a distant future, it is uncertain if the author held on to her goal. The core of the novel is, indeed, a luminous love story, but the overarching text is also a blunt account of harrowing violence, rape, and sudden, arbitrary death: “A woman raised her hand to say something. A gun went off. The woman was dead.” Is love a sufficient restoration of happiness in a world so troubled? We don’t find out. The reader is never presented with the ending of the disaster. The transition from the violent days to the longed-for cosiness of the promised land remains missing—perhaps there is no transition at all, and then the warm horizon is only an illusion.
Or maybe, the lack of resolution is justified by trauma’s resistance to real closure: “Even if you tie a nice little bow for the sake of an ending, a bow’s just a bow. The story continues even after the bow. You can’t get in the way of that.”
Alexandra Irimia is a doctoral student at Western University in Canada, with degrees in Comparative Literature, French Studies, and Political Science. She has published articles and reviews in academic journals such as Ekphrasis, MuseMedusa, Euresis and Studia Politica, while also contributing chapters to edited volumes including Contact Zones (Leuven UP, 2021), The Rhetoric of Topics and Forms (De Gruyter, 2021), Socializing Art Museums (De Gruyter, 2020), Working through the Figure (Bucharest UP, 2019), Usages de la figure, régimes de figuration (Bucharest UP, 2017). Six of her translations from English and French into Romanian have been included in Figura (Bucharest UP, 2017), a critical theory anthology. Alexandra currently volunteers as the Asymptote Book Club Manager and can be reached here.
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