For Cha In-pyo, an actor and writer, his fifth full-length novel, “Our Neighborhood Library,” is about what has motivated him to keep writing for 17 years: an abiding sense of gratitude to his readers.
“A novel is started by an author, but it is the readers who complete it,” Cha said at a press conference in Jung District, Seoul, on Wednesday. “I poured that gratitude into this book.”
The book is Cha’s first novel in two years. This time, he turns to metafiction, following a contemporary writer referred to as “I,” who writes about a painter in Goguryeo, an ancient Korean kingdom that existed from the first century B.C. to the seventh century A.D. In doing so, he contemplates desire, death and the meaning carried by records.
At the press conference, Cha opened with modesty and gratitude — an echo of the theme running through his new book.
“There are so many excellent writers in Korea,” Cha said. “I don’t think what I’ve done is anything particularly special. That makes me all the more grateful to be here.”
“Our Neighborhood Library” opens with a writer in a small library working on a story about Bun-gak, a Goguryeo-era painter who believes he should paint only what he has seen with his own eyes. When an aristocrat orders him to paint a dragon Bun-gak is forced into an impossible act of imagination.
Then, one day, a real dragon appears before the writer in the present, whispering words into his ear that unsettle both his ambition to become a bestselling author and his understanding of the limits of creation. As he wrestles with that confusion, he meets readers of his novel at the library, and the book traces his inward journey as he gradually learns to connect with others.
The new novel, which took Cha a year and a half to complete, differs from his previous works in that the writer is projected into the book as a character. Cha said he originally picked up his pen simply because he wanted to write a story about a dragon.
“At first, it was out of curiosity,” Cha said. “People in every part of the world, across every era, have known about dragons, even though no one has ever actually seen one.”
“But as I was writing the draft at the library, I was suddenly struck by a realization about why and how I had come to work on my fifth novel,” he said. “Without the people who read my novels and interpreted them in their own way, I would not have come this far.”
Source: Korea Times News
