Hyun Woo Kim's The Great Leader and His Eternal Life

An Editor Meditates on an Exciting New Novel

Dear Republic,

We like to be able to uplift the work of Substack writers. Substacker and ROL contributor Hyun Woo Kim has found a publisher, and it’s nice to be able to celebrate his work through his editor, David A. Westbrook.

-ROL

HYUN WOO KIM’S THE GREAT LEADER AND HIS ETERNAL LIFE

An obscure South Korean intellectual has written a wonderful novel, The Great Leader and His Eternal Life. I want to tell The Republic of Letters about it, so you readers can keep an eye peeled. Contracts are under negotiation, but as I write not finalized, so if one of you is in a position to bid, there may still be time. I have zero financial interest in this project, but warrant this to be a major book, art, a pleasure, and with things to teach. Also, The Great Leader would film very well, in perhaps painfully timely fashion. I was fortunate enough to edit the manuscript, which was difficult, and I want to talk about that, too.

What, some of you with knives well sharpened might ask, do I mean by “obscure”? Well obscure to me, occupying as I do the Hegelian position at the summit of capitalism and the end of history. Just kidding. By his own admission, though, Hyun Woo has been something of a lay about. (A huge percentage of Koreans are named Kim, for imperial reasons and another story, so I’m going to go by his first name. Besides, as his editor, Hyun Woo is an interlocutor of mine.) Flaneur would be flattering. He’s from South Korea, which as you probably know is a smallish country way off to the east, stuck between China, Japan, and Russia. Famously and violently divided during the Cold War. The South produces cars, ships and vacuous music, along with some very good food. The North is really poor but makes weapons. Even in that restricted frame, Hyun Woo does not seem to have attracted much attention. I’m given to believe this frustrates his family. No fancy job, no wife, no kids. His father is an academic of a STEM sort, has a real career. Ok, Hyun Woo was a zealous Leninist for a while, which got him into some trouble with the law, but the Koreans are strict and sometimes youth, shall we say, deviates. Not that big a deal, but nothing much to be proud of, either.

Not that the man has been entirely idle. He spent a little time in the US as a child and some time in Russia later (he studied Russian literature at college in Seoul) which I suppose explains the Commie phase, later became a serious Christian, neglected his Japanese but learned old Chinese and started translating poetry, picked up more than a little German and Latin, seems to have had sundry affairs, a fondness for alcohol and tea and a cigarette habit, wrote a few stories, got a fellowship, usw., and somewhere along this line the internet/substack/algos brought us into contact. He is among the best, and perhaps the most interestingly, educated person I know. None of which adds up to a great book, necessarily. But there it is.

At first cut The Great Leader is a historical novel, but of course appearances deceive. In 1994, the North Korean Leader, Kim Il Sung, died, and the Soviet Union ceased to exist as a legal entity. That much, at least, is true. But Kim Il Sung was the Founding Leader of the nation, and therefore in some sense (what sense is a central preoccupation of the book) could not die. So, the North Koreans, being less experienced in this sort of thing, summoned the “Lenin Lab,” the team of experts responsible for maintaining Lenin’s body on public view in Moscow. Lenin, after all, was similarly situated vis-à-vis the Soviet Union, and the Russians were reputed to have figured some things out about how to keep a body around forever, even longer than the Union which he embodied. So, the Russians come to Pyongyang to give the Great Leader eternal life, Marxist materialism and the ephemera of politics (of History?) notwithstanding.

But Kim Il-Sung’s body is compromised by the Koreans, by the summer heat, and by the incredible violence of the procedures. The Lenin Lab’s entire situation and perhaps the nation itself is compromised, and meanwhile the Soviet Union has collapsed and the Japanese and beyond that the Americans with their money loom. Who are the real communists now? And what does it all mean, or did it mean? Under the pressures of such circumstances, as well as age, sex, and simple personalities, the Lenin Lab fractures but also bonds. Various Koreans are drawn into the whirlpool, and, well, here’s a taste:

Fierce sunrays pierced the window. Katerina’s eyes were fixed on the mass of Koreans, moving away. Feofanych’s heart began to race. He remembered the briefing Director Ishchenko had given about the funeral. A hearse would drive through Pyongyang with Kim in a coffin. It was before seven, but the air had already begun to burn, more suffocating due to the humidity. A normal body, even if perfectly embalmed, would not be able to endure hours on top of a car in a closed casket. Irreparable damage was highly likely to be done, and Kim’s body was far from being perfect, too many warm viewings, too many bullets, too much dismemberment, falling furniture...

And we don’t even have Kim’s head. The two Nikolais had the same thought. They were so busy worrying about the head and Andrei, both missing, that they could not think about anything else.

Meanwhile, Petr had made up his mind. Even after the discovery of the bugging device inside the Pushkin bust, he could not conclude that the ambassador was not a double agent. Nevertheless, even if he was one and . . .

The book is a surreal farce with a hint of comedy, a gripping spy novel, has more than a trace of love stories and tragedy, all while meditating on the rise and fall of communism, on political representations of many sorts, on the nature of the book and political life, on the significance of the body upon death, with Dostoevsky never far away, and Russia and Korea and literature — so much literature, film and music, not to say ideology, several of the characters are Russian intellectuals, whatever their jobs may be. Given the cultural sources, I don’t know of anyone else who could have written it.

There I go again, falling into the philosopher’s trap of emphasizing ideas. This is a novel, however, not a treatise. Yes, the book is dense, but it is also easy. It moves — the storytelling is gripping, despite the weights the narrative carries. The characters are rounded as needs be; many have complex interior lives; almost all exist in subtle, shifting and dynamic relations. Although The Great Leader is not very long, like many a big 19^th century novel, there is something theatrical about how the characters move across the text. I am reminded of Russian novels, in which characters are not to be simply equated with ideas, even the ideas they espouse, but ideas emerge in the space the characters create amongst themselves. The first time I read the manuscript I did so in a sitting, with rising excitement at having found a diamond in the rough in my inbox.

It was rough, however, and that was a problem, not least for finding a publisher. American English is an insanely rich and irrational language, polyglot in the best sense. Hyun Woo is a sophisticated speaker, a literary exile in English as he likes to say, but it is not his mother tongue. A few things were simply wrong; many more were just distractingly unnatural. I begged Hyun Woo to let me take a crack at the text, to buff out the infelicities. I thus got the difficult yet delightful honor of wordsmithing the text.

I say “wordsmithing” because my editing rarely rose above the level of the paragraph. The Great Leader is tightly structured. The action takes place over a few days, in a few locations. Hyun Woo hasn’t closely hewed to the classical unities, but he hasn’t strayed far. I did not have to do anything to the order of things, and I made no amendments to the plot. By the same token, I did not change the characters, at least not intentionally. The people are well drawn, nicely shaded. The problem, as I’ve suggested, was the language itself, keeping the reader oriented in a semantically compressed and variously lit space.

English has a host of prepositions, most associated with verbs, often to the exclusion of other equally sensible prepositions. Sometimes saying “on” when the usage is “of” or “in” is just off putting, as distinct from put upon, if you see what I mean. Such “mistakes” are completely understandable, maybe even rational, but break the thread. This class of problems was easily remedied, for the most part.

Somewhat trickier were the nouns, especially proper nouns. I’m not entirely sure what mix of languages Hyun Woo thinks in when he writes English. But for languages with more cases and declensions, references are generally clear, and one can use a lot of pronouns. In English, however, we often use pronouns combined with space, so that “he” refers to the last male mentioned. To make matters worse, Russian has first and last names, but also patronyms, and people are also referred to by their titles, and sometimes by their roles, any of which the reader might have forgotten over the pages that have passed since this or that “name” was last used. At the same time, context often required different levels of formality. It was a lot to sort.

But the most difficult thing was the verbs, and this is due to the hyperconscious quality of Kim’s prose. A character not only speaks, she thinks about what she is saying, and what she feels she need not or sometimes should not say, while wondering what her listener is hearing, and he, too, is wondering. As a result, the difference between “she said” and “she was saying” or even “she had been saying” was not always clear. Often, I would simplify a sentence only to read a few lines down and realize I had erased a nuance that the sentence needed to establish, if perhaps not as phrased in the manuscript. It was fun, but took forever, along the lines of translating poetry. And I was gratified to hear that Kim accepted virtually all of my suggested amendments.

And what about the “strangeness” of my title? It’s not just that the book is about worlds very different from that of most readers of the Republic of Letters, both South and North Korea, Russia, the Soviet Union, and Russia again, whatever those words mean. It’s not just about nationalism unto zealotry, the madness of crowds, the Holy Ghost in Marxism, or the possible if difficult task of friendship across such divides, along with the usual difficulties of age, sex and the like, although all those things feature in The Great Leader. Hyun Woo is a profoundly Christian writer, and one perforce thinks of the Great Russians (I say this advisedly) in that his characters, entire peoples, move through a numinous world. That sense of meaning is difficult but not impossible to articulate, at least in waves and eddies. Hence the importance of literature throughout the book: Kim’s characters struggle to grasp the stream that sweeps individuals and entire nations onward. While hard to write, it is this numinous force that gives life meaning, sometimes urges and organizes violence, and may even cause men and women to sacrifice themselves in the name of something higher. Kim makes the legends of the two Koreas, and the opera that is Russia, for want of better words for something more than history, feel deeply believable.

Perhaps especially for The Republic of Letters crowd and that corner of Substack that cares about what I’m going to somewhat self-consciously call literature, it’s worth noting how far this book is from autofiction, or from the endless discussions of politics vis-à-vis art in “the discourse.” (My how that word has changed in recent years). And weirdly, Hyun Woo seems more cheerful than many of my compatriots, despite the real violence. His concerns are not the concerns of the bourgeois children of the North Atlantic countries who currently dominate contemporary Anglophone letters. Which is not to say that bourgeois life in our time does not have real problems; human life in all circumstances has existential problems. That is, after all, the condition. But Kim’s book arrives like a wind from a faraway place, another time, where the rules are very different.

Let me close on a slightly different note, maybe even stranger to many of today’s literati and sundry intellectuals. Although there is little religion in the book in any conventional sense, I think Kim’s Christianity ultimately makes him a comic writer. Or, to move from Jerusalem to Athens, maybe it’s the eroticism of the book that suggests comedy, which of course is not a contradiction. Be such things as they may, Hyun Woo allows himself a hint of comedy, although there is much more farce, indeed talk about farce, in the book. All of which makes The Great Leader timely for those of us in the United States, and perhaps some other places, too. We live in a farcical era. And I can say without spoiling anything that The Great Leader raises for at least one of its characters, and for us, the question of renewal, rebirth, spring. Where and how it will emerge we know not, but it will, it always does. Which, among other things, is a form of faith.

David A. Westbrook is a minor writer in various forms and across disciplines. Has photography habit. Supports self as professor (law). Overshares at Substack, Intermittent Signal. Once thought to have operative potential, has been reduced to being another man on an adventure who has gone astray. Low priority; continued observation; no immediate action.