Novelist Jo Jung-rae [Newsis]
Novelist Jo Jung-rae [Newsis]

Novelist Jo Jung-rae, 83, has returned with a new full-length novel, "Frost Flower" (Haenaem Publishing, 2 vols.).

At a press conference held Monday at the Press Center in Jung-gu, Seoul, Jo said he believes the novel will be his last. "I think this will be my final full-length work," he said. "For 56 years I have wrestled with literature as if fighting a battle, and now I want to turn my attention to short stories, which I have long neglected."

It is the first time Jo has placed love squarely at the center of his fiction. The novel follows the romance between two university students, Lee Jae-i and Yun So-in, who meet through a campus poetry club. Moved by a poem Lee writes for an exhibition, Yun paints a work inspired by Vincent van Gogh's "The Starry Night." Lee is pushed by his businessman father to study abroad in the United States, and when he returns to Seoul five years later, the two find each other changed — yet their feelings begin to stir again.

The idea for a love story came from a question a reader posed at a lecture: "Why do you only write about history and society — why not romance and love?" Jo recalled being caught off guard. "I remember hesitating at that unexpected question," he said. "Since the time I have left to write is shrinking, I felt that a love story — something readers had wanted — would be meaningful."

As with his previous works, Jo wrote the novel by hand on manuscript paper rather than on a computer. "When you write on a computer, the sentences become dry and lose their density," he said. "When you press each character by hand, the sentences pass through your soul, and a far greater tension and pull between them comes alive."

Jo made his literary debut in 1970 through the journal "Hyeondae Munhak" and has published 68 books in total, including the new novel. Last year he underwent surgery for an abdominal aortic aneurysm and said he came close to death. In his author's note, Jo wrote that his final wish is "to die slumped over my desk while writing."


husn7@heraldcorp.com