An unfamiliar world presented through bold imagination
Kim Tae-ho is a budding children’s story writer who has produced noteworthy works since he received the Changbi Prize for New Figures in Children’s Literature. He now presents Square Pigs, which gathers unique and highly polished tales including his maiden work “Wait!” which was evaluated with the praise that “it [was] a great fortune to witness short story aesthetics on this level.” In seven stories for youngsters, the author develops the narrative by portraying problematic situations through bold imagination. The title work, “Square Pigs” is a tale about pigs that are raised in a square metal box and a round pig who reads to them a book about how to go to heaven. “How to Recycle Cats” is a story about a cat trapped in a recycling bin for old clothes. A parody of the traditional Korean tale “The Brother and Sister Who Became the Sun and the Moon,” “One Day, a Tiger Came to My House” is a story about a woman who wagers her life in a contest with a tiger that one day appears and opens the door to her apartment. By realistically showing how animals respond in unfamiliar spaces and in unfamiliar incidents and why seemingly preposterous circumstances occur, Kim leads readers to see events and situations in children’s tales as things that can happen around us as well. Serious and keen is the question pervading the entire volume: “What would you have done?”
An unfamiliar and strange world from animals’ perspectives
The stories collected in Square Pigs develop through the voices of animals. These animals realistically portray humans and their world from their standpoints. The protagonist of the first work in the collection, “Wait!” is a dog left alone in a village from which all humans have left due to a sudden accident. In a situation where it can obtain neither food nor water, it waits for its master, who cherished it as a family member. Even though all other beasts leave the village in scorn, the canine awaits until the end, believing in the return of its master, who left with the word “Wait!” The tiger that stars in “One Day, a Tiger Came to My House” enters a private human home and pretends to be the matriarch of the family. Although the beast resembles the mother only in appearance, with a completely different voice and strange clothing, members of this family merely see this as slightly odd and none of them realizes the true identity of the imposter. While the tales gathered in Square Pigs are fabular as they frequently star anthropomorphized animals, Kim does not focus on satirizing humans and conveying didactic messages. Rather, in the process of exposing through the voices of animals problems that people have overlooked or pretended not to see, he painstakingly provides youngsters with opportunities to think. In the course of reading Square Pig, which calmly and sensitively depicts the ways in which humans live, readers will come to see our world a bit differently.