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Daewoo
Publisher
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Fayard
Parution date
:
EAN
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9782213618715
Number of pages
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300
Description
***Recipient of the 2010 French Voices Translation Grant***
***Translation sample available***
In 1997, the international Korean corporation Daewoo promised the administration and residents of the economically devastated region of Lorraine in France that their new electronics factories would return life and a viable economy to a region that had been ravaged by the collapse of the steel industry. Fortunes were made, but only for Daewoo management, who embezzled millions of dollars, including public subsidies, in one of the greatest accounting frauds in modern history. When the theft was discovered, the factories were shut down and the company president, Kim Woo-Choong, hid out in a French villa before returning to Korea to face trial. These facts grabbed headlines worldwide, but not much was written about the men and women whose lives and livelihoods were destroyed by the scandal. François Bon, in his historical novel Daewoo, corrects this omission.
Daewoo is an evocative and powerful novel based on documentary research and interviews with former employees of the company. Bon provides faces and voices for the workers who were most affected by this tragedy and yet were ignored in the newspaper accounts, which mostly concerned account ledgers. The book focuses on the stories of four women who worked at Daewoo and on the haunting absence of a fifth woman, Sylvia, who committed suicide after the plant closed.
Bon started out writing a play based on the events, but the human voices, faces, stories, and silences compelled him to do more than simply record and transcribe. To capture the depths of this drama, he wrote Daewoo. He has said, “If these workers no longer have a place anywhere, let this novel be their memoir.”
Author
François Bon : François Bon was born in 1953. Before becoming an acclaimed prize-winning author, he was an engineer in the aerospace and nuclear industries. He is the author, most notably, of Sortie d’Usine (Minuit, 1979), Limite (Minuit, 1985), Le Crime de Buzon (Minuit, 1986), and Un fait divers (Minuit, 1994). In addition to writing, he dedicates himself to teaching and organizing writing workshops, particularly for underprivileged people.
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