![\"\"](\"http:\/\/pcxsx1namun1ljpw72henvgf.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/KB-The-Private-Lives-of-Plants-11.jpg\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
I once heard the Korean filmmaker Lee Sang-woo make a remark that shed a lot of light on the expectations of an international \u201cart\u201d filmmaker. He named Titanic <\/em>as his personal favorite movie and claimed to want to do nothing more than make a silly romantic comedy, yet to that point had a filmography full of grim microbudget features set among Korea\u2019s more desperate classes with names likeFather Is a Dog<\/em> (\uc544\ubc84\uc9c0\ub294 \uac1c\ub2e4) and Mother Is a Whore <\/em>(\uc5c4\ub9c8\ub294 \ucc3d\ub140\ub2e4). He\u2019d made them, he said, because film festivals go for them; they want to see the \u201cdark side\u201d of the places their movies come from, so he\u2019d obligingly darkened it up every time. (He said it at a Q&A following his latest picture, a high-school story of drugs, prostitution, cancer, and sex addiction.)<\/p>\n
Lee Seung-u\u2019s The Private Life of Plants <\/em>(\uc2dd\ubb3c\ub4e4\uc758 \uc0ac\uc0dd\ud65c), which opens with its narrator driving around looking for working girls for his disfigured brother who, without regular sexual activity, goes into thrashing, terrifying fits \u2014 and this as an alternative to the brother\u2019s former practice of having his mother carry him on her back to the brothels \u2014 at first struck me as an example of the same phenomenon. If world cinema has this festival-driven bias toward extravagant misery, might smaller and more \u201cserious\u201d publishers have incentivized the same thing in world literature? But the more I read, the more the novel deviated from my expectations \u2014 and the more pleasingly strange it became.<\/p>\n
We learn that the narrator, Ki-hyeon, feels responsible for the loss of his brother Woo-hyeon\u2019s legs. It happened due to an explosion during a military training exercise, and he got sent off to the military as a punishment for have taken the wrong pictures during his brief time as an avid photographer. \u201cI remember the days when my brother was always on the streets with his camera,\u201d remembers Ki-hyeon. \u201cIt was a time when Seoul often teemed with demonstrators and the air was filled with tear gas. His eyes watering and nose running, he devotedly clicked his shutter. He took photos of the police throwing tear gas bombs and wielding their clubs wile charging against protesters. He snapped shots of protesters throwing firebombs against the police shields, and photos of grimacing passerby, running for safety to avoid exploding tear gas bombs.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n