Perchan's Chorea: Eros and Exile [Hardcover]

Robert J. Perchan (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This pleasingly off-center novella by an American professor at a South Korean university comprises sketches and prose poems; it's an East-West swap meet of linguistic anecdotes, word lists, news clips, film and book reviews, TV cartoons, an account of plastic surgery, advice to the lovelorn and Korean erotica. The setting is the cohabitation of a poet and a prostitute who engage in a lively exchange of cultural oddities, nearly all of them rooted in the body. The punning title links the country's name with both a sexually transmitted disease and a spasmodic tic. The Korean word for a woman's breast, which translates as "milk room," prompts images of her body as a house with corridors. Recipes for home medicaments and food can be viscerally revolting, or comic--as when a woman unleashes a stream of "scolding" invective against a pot of boiling clams because the recipe instructs her to "scald" them. Perchan interjects pithy observations on the varieties of Buddha, e.g., Edgar Allan Buddha, "on the edge--or in the Pit"; and Buddha, M.B.A., "on the path of Tao-Jones." A persistent reference to the culture's demeaning treatment of women runs through the book's wealth of serious fun.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews

A happy surprise, this little elegant book about venery and scrutability and foreignness and style. Perchan, Cleveland-raised, teaches college in Korea, and his base of operations feeds his predilection for aphoristic, Latinate, dying-fall prose. Whether it's the deadpan reprinting of letters to the Korea Herald (proof that cultures themselves get all tangled up in their own expectations of tradition and change), or semi-scientific classifications of Korean female pubic-hair patterns, or hilarious dialogues between the author-persona and his hardly respectable girlfriends, Perchan trains on whatever's Korean a gimlet-eye and sad amusement; the poise of the style and the epigrammatic posture bring a less dour Edward Dahlberg, or Cyril Connolly, or even Catullus, to mind. ``The Korean Government is threatening harsh measures in a crackdown on alcohol-related births. The republic, in fact, leads the world in the export of babies for adoption. Like storks, young world-travelers with empty pockets can hitch a free flight stateside by accompanying an orphan to its new home across the water. As a thrilled childless couple waits expectantly at the LAX arrival gate, Korean Air Flight 006 touches on the runway, its huge pneumatic tires smoking and hissing that first passionate, drunken kiss now very far away.'' A lovely book. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 147 pages
• Publisher: Waterfront Pr (October 1991)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0922820155
• ISBN-13: 978-0922820153
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 5.8 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #6,493,794 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Korea as Chorea, Perchan's anti-PC poetic brew..., September 1, 2005

By 

Rob Wilson (Santa Cruz and Honolulu) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Perchan's Chorea: Eros and Exile (Hardcover)

Although the Chinese Ch'an meditation masters liked to remind disciples that "The lowest class of monk is the one who indulges in literature," Robert Perchan in Perchan's Chorea (Wichita, Kansas: Watermark Press, 1991), for all his Rabelasian rauchiness and flesh-haunted wit, comes across as something of a monk as much as a poet in his travelogue on his perverse nights and days in South Korea. The bald, pudgy and minoxidil-dropping Buddha figure shadowing this cross-cultural journey into Pusan and Seoul has pitched his poetic mansions in the foul-rag and bone shops of a whore-loving heart. Recounting his ill-fated loves across language barriers and cultural blinders with three women named "In-Ja," "Mi-Ja," and "Un-Joo," Perchan is looking for love-- and the Buddha, and the muse of poetry-- in all the wrong places, like his beloved Korean goddess Un-Joo scolding the clams ("YOU GODDAM CLAMS! YOU ARE GOOD FOR NOTHING! I WORK MY FINGER TO A BONE AND YOU COME HOME STINKY OF SOJU AND YOUR PANTS IS FILTHY!") when she should be scalding them. This Korean version of Madame Butterfly ultimately will stomp the American dreamer.

Perchan's "Chorea" creates and choreographs its own venereal world elsewhere, compounded of fact, word lists, linguistic anecdotes, news clips, fiction, cartoons, balderdash, an account of plastic surgery, vision, advice to the lovelorn, Korean erotica, private fragment. Choreatic, extreme, the sketches and prose poems of an American professor lost and found in Seoul, nobody would accuse Perchan's Chorea of being politically correct nor even mimetically faithful, amid the warfare of post-orientalism, despite Perchan's excerpts of Korean Herald items and ill-written love letters chunked into the text. Still, this mixture of narrative, cultural commentary, and lyric fragment comprises a stupendously funny, gutsy and funky, language-tuned, and quite touching portrait of "eros and exile" in South Korea.

As creature and creation of cultural sadomasochism, Perchan cuts through sentimentality, cant, and cultural piety towards revealing the class brutality, male exploitation of women, and commonplace misery that remain in this Asian NIC. Given the tragic and conflict-ridden history of Korean people in the twentieth century, it is risky to compound any Korean problem by exposing it. Further, "To injure [Korean] national pride, no matter how minimally," writes Nagisha Oshima in "Korea As I Saw It," "is unforgivable," and this social touchiness remains a problem some twenty years after the Japanese film director himself found the chance for redemption amid the reconstructed rubble and furiously human energy of Seoul.

The result of Perchan's comic journey into otherness turns into a fractured jewel of a book, a homage to Korean women as the exploited heart and soul of this strong country. Like the anthropologist friend categorizing Korean women by their pubic hair, Perchan is admittedly one of the American exploiters, fallen, abused, lost somewhere in the pits and on the edges of redemption. But the honesty may just save him.

Finally, as in Im Kwan Taek's cinematic portrait of Korean spiritual life in modern times, Mandala, the Buddha of Korean zen is not found in temples and groves but in beer houses, train stations, makoli parties, whore houses, the love of orphans, bastards, the dispossessed. The quest remains a male- centered story of selfish contracts and broken loves, expressed without bitterness or rage. Perchan's Chorea registers a story of compounded fragments and lyric insights well worth savoring.