La noche de la Usina

love’s romanticism. Jeong is a feral trap and release. Jeong kills and births, separates and unites—what we can “come down” or “rise up” with like a disease or cure. We have Jeong for the mother we know or do not know; we have Jeong for the country of our birth as we do for the breath in our bodies, and for these reasons, Jeong is responsible for both acts of great tenderness and violence . For Jeong, we can wage violence on behalf of something akin to tenderness. With Jeong, there is no separation between what is good or bad—only the deepest feeling that compels us to save our souls. Therefore, there is no difference between a pastor and a dictator. They are both sick with their own Jeong and soothed by it. Using Jeong, we can enter Lee’s characters ’ lives with reverence. Yongju is not a self-pitying exile, but rather he is inordinately tough—an identity composed of both self-flagellation and heroism. Jangmi is not a scrappy slave, but she is godly for aggregating worth to her life for each day she survives it. Danny’s emotions do not belong to himself, but they are a tribute to his worldliness and empathy. Yongju forgiving Jangmi can be attributed to his Jeong as much as Jangmi’s contemplating suicide from a windowsill can belong to Jeong. To read with reverence, not neglect, we can understand that these characters are a microcosm not only of the North Korean crisis but of the whole of our humanity. As Americans, we cannot share the experience of living in North Korea. But as humans, we can feel what it is to lose willpower , to be brutalized, to condemn one’s world, country, and self. Though experiences are unique, emotions are universal. It may be common to look at traitors in terms of traitors in the book armed with gun or Bible—traitors that live in another place we do not feel responsible for. But I dare to ask this question: How much are we, as humans, traitors to ourselves? When confronted with this question, we are not confused by the word traitors. We are confused by the word ourselves. When we begin to think of “I” as plural, though we live in a society that embraces the word “I,” we dare to see and act from a place of reverence. We call it love, but we cannot transform as shown by Lee’s characters through love alone. We must question our Jeong, the deepest parts that choose what we stand for when no one is watching , then act. The greatest inhumanity in the book is not the torture, betrayal, and slaughter. It is the silence that follows the end. It is the contemplation that this is not a story to be shelved and, at best, reviewed on paper. In another space, beyond the characters and the questions they offer, what’s left is achingly bright: inhumanity forced upon others ends the moment we know them as ourselves. EJ Koh Bellevue, Washington Eduardo Sacheri. La noche de la Usina. Madrid. Alfaguara. 2016. 362 pages. Eduardo Sacheri’s La noche de la Usina won the prestigious Alfaguara Novel Prize for 2016. An accomplished fiction and scriptwriter, Sacheri earned international Matías Celedon The Subsidiary Trans. Samuel Rutter Melville House Chilean novelist Matias Celedon’s new work is composed entirely of rubberstamp impressions on the page. With only the approximate language on hand in the stamps, an employee of the cryptlike Subsidiary relays harrowing days of being trapped in an office without electricity or guidance beyond “Remain and Survive.” Mauro Javier Cardenas The Revolutionaries Try Again Coffee House Press Mauro Javier Cardenas explores the fate of youthful political idealism with a quick style and comic effect. Situated in Ecuador, The Revolutionaries Try Again follows childhood friends, now grown, as they labor against governmental, religious, and economic systems so ingrained in life that they often appear relentless. Nota Bene WORLDLIT.ORG 71 attention with his first novel, La pregunta de sus ojos (2005), and its Academy Award–winning Spanish-language movie version, whose filmscript he co-authored with director Juan José Campanella. (See

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