Pull-ups / 9
Commentary / 118

"The feeling of moving forward, the satisfaction of living as that kind of person."
Finally admit it to yourself and take a step forward!

The new work, "Pull-Up," by Kang Hwa-gil, who left a strong impression on readers by winning the grand prize at the 2020 Young Writer's Award, has been published.
The author, who has solidified her literary world by fiercely depicting women's lives and the absurdity and hatred within them in her first short story collection, "A Good Person," her first full-length novel, "Another Person," and her second short story collection, "White Horse," shows a more advanced appearance of overcoming that absurdity and hatred and moving toward herself in this novel.


Jisoo, who has never even thought about exercising and has never said a bad word to anyone in her life, falls victim to a housing scam and moves into her mother's house.
Jisoo, who suffered from nightmares every night, notices a woman running at the same time every morning and begins working out at the gym she attends, gaining new energy.
Jisoo is praised for her diligence in coming to work out at the same time every day, and she is renewing her life by focusing on the things she likes and the things she enjoys.


Misu, who graduated from a good school, got a job at a large company, and got married well, is always the pride of her family.
Since she was young, Misu has been responsible for the family's livelihood in place of her older sister Jisoo, who has been late in everything.
Jisoo thinks she has done her part to the best of her ability, but to Misu, she is always just an inadequate older sister.
When Jisoo says she is receiving PT, Misoo is surprised, and Jisoo reads Misoo's thoughts from her face.
"What kind of life do you want for me? To always live as an older sister who is worse than you.
Growing old in a miserable way, without making any effort for myself.
Living as someone you can continue to feel sorry for.
Something that allows you to enjoy that feeling.
Is that so?”

Mother Young-ae thinks of everything from Mi-su's perspective, and Ji-soo feels sorry for her mother.
However, Young-ae's true feelings were different from what Ji-soo had guessed, and the sisters had no way of knowing their mother's true feelings.
Young-ae loved her sisters equally and did her best to raise them.
Only the daughters are unaware of this fact.


Jisoo and Misu sat across from each other at a cafe.
Misu worries about her mother's safety after Jisoo's sudden declaration of independence, and the two, who have never fought before, engage in a heated argument for the first time.
And at that place, Jisoo reveals her true feelings that she had been hiding from Misu.

Jisoo loved her family.
I meant it.
And I truly hated them.
Jisoo decides to leave her feelings alone.
On the day she signs the lease, Jisoo heads to a new gym.
And there, she sees the pull-up machine that brought her to the gym in the first place, and she gets excited about doing pull-ups.
Could I transform into something bigger, stronger, and more comfortable than I am now? If I could impress my presence like that, I anticipate that place might become my "palace."

Jisoo knows now.
I used to think that “family is a relationship that can never be broken,” but I realized that “that’s not necessarily true.”
If you can't understand each other, there's no need for either of you to sacrifice and try to maintain the relationship.
What is more important than maintaining the name and relationship of family is taking care of the one who was sacrificed in the process, that is, “the relationship with oneself.”
That's why the scene at the end of the novel where Jisoo challenges herself to do pull-ups is so touching.
(……) Jisoo will never forget the feeling he had now.
Just as I overcame the alienation and self-loathing within my family by reacquainting myself with my new bodily sensations, I will be able to use this new sense as a springboard to rebuild my own narrative.
The challenge of someone who has regained the language to express their subjectivity, which is disappearing through their own power, is incomparably beautiful.
So Yu-jeong (literary critic)

The emotions they couldn't express in the name of family! Their story of true love and true hate.
“When your mom only looks at you… isn’t it burdensome?”

"Pull Up" is the story of a woman searching for a stimulus in life.
Of course, it is not a feeling that can be awakened all at once.
You can only feel it if you endure the pain that runs through your body and keep going without stopping. You can only feel it if you endure the pain that runs through your body and keep going without stopping.
While Jisoo focuses on his own movements, it is the voice in parentheses that gives strength to the focal speaker who has lost his own language.
The narrator in parentheses in Kang Hwa-gil's novel is not unfamiliar to us.
(……) The parentheses in the pull-up are similar but different.
The still vivid and detailed, yet silent, exponents within the parentheses bring us closer to the characters.
And when Jisoo finds her own language, that is, at the end of the novel, she takes off the parentheses and becomes one with her voice.
At the same time, Jisoo now becomes someone who can talk about 'me'.
─So Yu-jeong, from “Work Commentary”

The forty-eighth volume of "Pin Novels," published by the monthly magazine "Modern Literature"!

The "Modern Literature Pin Series" is a project that selects the most modern and cutting-edge writers of contemporary Korean literature, presents them in the monthly magazine "Modern Literature," and then publishes them in book form.
The single volumes presented here are individual works, but are also curated by six authors as a 'series'.
Modern literature hopes that the seriousness of this series will be ironically combined with the delicate lightness of the word 'pin'.

The "Modern Literature Pin Series Novel Selection" is published by the monthly magazine "Modern Literature" on the 25th of every other month, and is designed to allow readers to encounter new works by Korea's top writers on a set date.
This is a kind of 'salary book' concept that is being introduced for the first time in Korean publishing history.


Modern Literature × Artist Lee Yeon-mi

The "Modern Literature Pin Series" has become an original novel collection, an art anthology, reconstructed as a special work of art with a cover work imbued with the artist's soul.
The reason each novel possesses its own unique fragrance and profound artistic fascination is probably because of the spiritual harmony created by the meeting of the two worlds of novels and art.

Lee Yeon-mi
He graduated from the Department of Painting at Kookmin University's College of Fine Arts and the Department of Painting at the same university's graduate school.
Starting with a solo exhibition at the Tokyo Gallery, he has participated in solo and group exhibitions at home and abroad, including at Gallery Hyundai, the Seoul Museum of Art, and the Shanghai Art Museum.
He is actively building his own garden, maximizing the gap between reality and fantasy, and creating a lyrical world of sculptures intertwined with rough-hewn trees and mysterious and unfamiliar flora and fauna.