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This riveting allegory starts as a simple power play within a children's classroom, but turns into a chilling tale about the lust for power and desperate need for acceptance that reside within us all.
When the twelve-year-old narrator of Our Twisted Hero moves from Seoul to a small provincial town and enrolls in the local school, he's confident that his big-city sophistication will establish him as a natural leader. But he immediately falls victim to a charismatic and corrupt class monitor, who uses fear and violence to keep the other students under his mysterious spell and to assure his own supremacy in the school's social hierarchy. The teacher, grateful to have such a well-behaved class, turns a blind eye to the monitor's abuse of power. As the narrator attempts first to seek justice and then to inspire his fellow students to revolt, he finds himself in a fierce battle not just for his rights, but for his soul. Soon he has set in motion an unexpected and unstoppable chain of events.
This riveting allegory, in the tradition of Lord of the Flies, starts as a simple power play within a children's classroom, but turns into a chilling tale about the lust for power and desperate need for acceptance that reside within us all.
Our Twisted Hero is Yi Munyol's first book ever to be published in North America. With its classically unadorned style and disturbing insights, it will astound readers unfamiliar with this extraordinary writer of world standing.
Salman Rushdie
Our Twisted Hero lifts the curtain on an unknown (to me, anyway) corner of the world to reveal the universality of human frailty. This delicate, unsentimental tale of bully and victim, of a schoolyard prince's rise and fall, reminded me of Gunter Grass's great novella Cat and Mouse. An absorbing book by a major writer.
If you liked Our Twisted Hero, try these:
by Hisham Matar
Published 2008
In the Country of Men is a stunning depiction of a child confronted with the effects of Libyan strongman Khadafy's 1969 September revolution. But above all, it is a debut of rare insight and literary grace.
by Katherine Min
Published 2008
Isadora Myung Hee Sohn, known as Isa, worships her mother, an exceptional beauty. Isa’s father, a scientist and professor, and an orphan, is haunted by the war in which he served as a South Korean soldier and by a painful secret that he keeps from his wife. Still mourning the death of Isa’s younger brother her parents are traditional ...
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