Book: A LOVE STORY FROM THE END OF THE WORLD
Author: Juhea Kim
Published by: The Borough Press
Price: Rs 599
Climate fiction, the works of J.G. Ballard, Amitav Ghosh, and N.K. Jemisin’s “The Broken Earth” series, mostly takes the form of the novel. Juhea Kim’s book, on the other hand, is a collection of ten short stories written between 2015 and 2024. The slim volume represents the global climate crisis in settings as diverse as Seoul, New York, London, and the Arctic zone. The stories also play around with time and narrative voice —some are set in a dystopian future, some in the contemporary world — while also achieving the rare feat of using the second-person narrative voice without stiltedness or awkwardness.
These stories weave together themes such as human emotions, the catastrophic effects of climate change, and human-nature interactions into a seamless whole. They are rich in literary allusions, from the Bible (“Bioark”), to Dante, Coleridge, Kafka (“The Tree of Life”), to name a few. The range of these allusions underscores the issues that have been a matter of concern in human history. Not only literary allusions, Kim also creates a sense of belonging to contemporary time and place by incorporating references to popular culture: “Notting Hill”, for example, uses the eponymous movie to create the backdrop for a story on loss and betrayal.
The spirit of this collection of stories is best described in the words from the book itself, spoken by the self-important editor of a journal to a potential employee — “Absolutely brilliant — somehow your writing makes me feel grief, but also hope…” If there is another undercurrent that moves through the stories along with the concern over climate change, it is the idea of hope, the hope that as human beings we — individually and collectively — can still work towards salvaging at least some of the damage we have wrought on our planet. This hope is embodied not only in the stories but also in the Author’s Note appended at the end of the book.
Kim’s work is relevant, evocative, and brilliant in its rendition of a challenge that all of us are facing but are living in denial of, precipitating the inevitable Doomsday in the process. This collection is the work of a master storyteller whose stories will resonate with every reader aware of the contemporary reality.
