Yi Sang
Kim did not content himself with a place in the shadow of a literary great. His third novel, "Goodbye, Yi Sang" was met with a critical reception worthy of a masterpiece at the very pinnacle of humanistic imagination. To be sure, Borgesian influence is still unmistakable, but only in the background: the novel, as a whole, is animated by the author's own meticulous and in-depth study of Yi Sang, the Korean existentialist writer of the 1930s who produced some of the most exotic and complex stories in Korean literary history. "Goodbye, Yi Sang" is concerned with the question of truth and of existence as well as the very definition of literature which, in Kim's view, are not mutually exclusive. “The reason why I write,” the author has said,” is to find out whether the truth does indeed exist in the act of writing."”