The Korean Sohn (abbreviating so as not to cause sudden dyslexia) is an expert in the most radical narrative. Not because of her extremes in the argument, but because of her brilliant commitment to the most etymological of the indicated term "radical", that is, the root of our being.
Back and forth emotions, reaching both extremes to become something antagonistic. The way we are, carrying our contradictions, has a lot to do with the opposite poles and the feeling that if we go a little further, we are back, like the world itself.
Meanwhile, Sohn is in charge of showing them the way with a work that will undoubtedly take new paths at some point. But for the moment that fresh perspective of the emotional abounds as a parallel path that very occasionally, and surprisingly, draws a tangential line, for better or for worse, and crosses our path, leaving us defenseless as before a great earthquake. .
Top recommended books by Won-Pyung Sohn
Almonds
In literature we are surprised by those peripheral, atypical, eccentric characters. Protagonists who can go from The Quijote but also Dorian Gray, Holden Caulfield or even Dante. Although in the case of Yuntae, things point more to Jean Baptiste Grenouille from El perfume. Because it is about an anomalous type dedicated to the cause of teaching us how strange and abnormal are all the rest of us who take refuge in the mediocrity, in the supposed normality.
Yunjae is sixteen years old, he is at the age of overflowing emotions, love and anger. But the tonsils in her brain are small, smaller than an almond, and as a consequence, Yunjae is unable to feel anything.
Raised by his mother and grandmother, he learns to identify the emotions of others and to fake moods so as not to stand out in a world that will soon see him as an outsider. "If your interlocutor cries, you narrow your eyes, lower your head and give him a gentle pat on the back," his mother tells him. This is how he builds an apparent normality that is shattered the day a psychopath attacks both women in the street. Since then, Yunjae must learn to live alone, without the desire to shed a tear, without sadness or fear or happiness.
Unlikely people reach out to Yunjae: an old friend of his mother's, a girl capable of breaking certainties, and even a bully with more affinity than expected. The three will break the loneliness of the protagonist of Almendra.
Momentum
Leaning into the abyss of existence, everything that appears below is a diffuse warning of defeat. Something so magnetic, once the hard path to perdition has been ascended, that few suicides stop being suicides. You can give yourself the necessary little push, whichever way it is in the end, there is no doubt that it will always mark a turning point. The question is daring to change the bet at that last moment...
Andrea Kim Seong-gon is a failure. In business, in the family, in the economic. Even when she makes the decision to kill herself, she doesn't succeed. But it is then, from the depths of her abyss, that she becomes obsessed with something trivial: changing her body posture. What Seong-gon doesn't know is that this small gesture will set in motion a series of changes that will completely renew his life.
Impulse is, in many ways, an extension of Almond, Won-Pyung Sohn's debut novel. If Almendra was the story of a child unable to feel, who learns with effort to communicate with those around him, El impulso narrates the transformation process of a man who has lost the ability to be emotional, but who is trying to recover it.
Hitting bottom is only the first step to get to the surface.
