Bae Suah, Deborah Smith: Untold Night and Day (2020, Penguin Random House)
English language
Published Sept. 26, 2020 by Penguin Random House.
A seductive, disorienting novel that manipulates the fragile line between dreams and reality, by South Korea’s leading contemporary writer
A startling and boundary-pushing novel, Untold Night and Day tells the story of a young woman’s journey through Seoul over the course of a night and a day. It’s 28-year-old Ayami’s final day at her box-office job in Seoul’s audio theater. Her night is spent walking the sweltering streets of the city with her former boss in search of Yeoni, their missing elderly friend, and her day is spent looking after a mysterious, visiting poet. Their conversations take in art, love, food, and the inaccessible country to the north.
Almost immediately, in the heat of Seoul at the height of the summer, order gives way to chaos as the edges of reality start to fray, with Ayami becoming an unwitting escort into a fever-dream of increasingly tangled threads, all the while …
A seductive, disorienting novel that manipulates the fragile line between dreams and reality, by South Korea’s leading contemporary writer
A startling and boundary-pushing novel, Untold Night and Day tells the story of a young woman’s journey through Seoul over the course of a night and a day. It’s 28-year-old Ayami’s final day at her box-office job in Seoul’s audio theater. Her night is spent walking the sweltering streets of the city with her former boss in search of Yeoni, their missing elderly friend, and her day is spent looking after a mysterious, visiting poet. Their conversations take in art, love, food, and the inaccessible country to the north.
Almost immediately, in the heat of Seoul at the height of the summer, order gives way to chaos as the edges of reality start to fray, with Ayami becoming an unwitting escort into a fever-dream of increasingly tangled threads, all the while images of the characters’ overlapping realities repeat, collide, change, and reassert themselves in this masterful work that upends the very structure of fiction and narrative storytelling and burns itself upon the soul of the reader.
By one of the boldest and most innovative voices in contemporary Korean literature, and brilliantly realized in English by International Man Booker–winning translator Deborah Smith, Bae Suah’s hypnotic and wholly original novel asks whether more than one version of ourselves can exist at once, demonstrating the malleable nature of reality as we know it.
Still processing this one.
I was gonna dnf it after the first part, as it just wasn’t that interesting. It’s a short book though so thankfully I persisted. The way everything loops and interweaves is fascinating. It’s oddly satisfying to discover links and references to other parts of the text.
Very interesting concept, well executed and definitely worth a read.
