Guillaume Bouzard

Some of the stories in this collection were fantastic; others were distinctly mediocre. By "others" I'm mostly referring to the French ones.

The problem is that creators who've been sent to a country on a brief visit in order to write about their impressions can only really tell one story: character arrives in Korea, is struck by its amazing exotic foreignness, eats bulgogi (bulgogi is the restaurant dish you feed foreigners who you don't know well enough to trust with anything other than bulgogi), gets drunk on soju and/or baekseju, and leaves. And sure enough, all of the French stories follow this basic format (admittedly in two stories you couldn't be certain they were eating bulgogi, and one brave story went for beondegi instead) and only two or three did anything remotely interesting with it.

Bouzard's "Operation Captain Zidane", I admit, was inspired. Sapin's "Beondegi" was mildly amusing and Igort's "Letters from Korea" at least attempted to go deeper than a tourist's impressions.

The Koreans' stories divided neatly into those looking at traditional life (Lee Doo-hoo's "Solgeo's Tree"; Park Heung-yong's "Cinderella"; Lee Hee-jae's "The Pine Tree") and those looking at modern social problems (Choi Kyu-sok's "The Fake Dove"; Byun Ki-hyn's "The Rabbit"; Chaemin's "The Rain That Goes Away Comes Back"). These were all really good but I can't help think that if, had the outsider's view not been given a full half of the book, there would have been room for even more variety among these.… (altro)