THE OLD WOMAN WITH THE KNIFE

This intense allegorical tale is here translated twice, once into English from the Korean, and then into audio, and the listener has a sense of being estranged from the author's intentions by one or perhaps both of these processes. The title character, known only by her professional alias, Hornclaw, has been an assassin since she was 15. Now alone, aging, and beginning to make mistakes, she is trying to imagine her opaque future when it becomes apparent that something from her murderous past is also stalking her. Nancy Wu can't seem to get a handle on this character, abstract as she is, or help the listener much to experience the sorrow and terror of Gu's plot or her layered meanings about Korean society. B.G. © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine [Published: MARCH 2022]