Recent Reading: Untold Night and Day

Book #7 from the "Women in Translation" rec list: Untold Night and Day by Bae Suah, translated from Korean by Deborah Smith.

 

Trying to accurately describe the plot of this book is an exercise in futility, so I'm not going to bother. All I can say is it centers around Ayami, a woman who is an actress, or maybe a poet, or possibly both, and is on her last day of work at an audio theater for the blind in Seoul. 

 

This is a book I feel like I'd have to read at least one more time all the way through to be able to really discuss the themes and motifs at play. It's an incredibly cerebral novel that never gives up a clear answer about what's happening. What's real or not real changes from scene to scene. Is Ayami an orphan? Did she have a wealthy aunt? Is she the poet from Buha's youth? Is the director the bus driver? Who really got hit by the bus, and who was the murdered woman in the attic? Is Ayami Yeoni? The book leaves you to your own conclusions.

 

This is a book that I feel you'll either love or really hate. I enjoyed the trip, but it's hard to explain why. Reading this felt like running a fever in August; the whole thing is a sweaty, sticky dream where you can't tell if a conversation you had was real or not or real and supplemented in your memory by the dream. Early in the book, Suah presents one of the best descriptions of living through a heat wave I've ever read as she describes being in Seoul at the height of summer. I'm going to quote a few lines here just to give you an idea:

"The midsummer metropolis was a temple of benumbed languor, the home of long-vanished, cult-worshipping tribes. Rarefied sleep sucked bodies into a burning crater lake choked with sticky flakes of black soap ash and honeycomb chunks of grey pumice. In cramped rooms unrelieved by air conditioning or even a fan, if you opened the window hot air heavier than a sodden quilt rushed in, clogging your pores like the wet slap of raw meat, but with it closed the oxygen would quickly evaporate, disappearing at a frightening rate until the air was filled with nothing but heat. Nothing but the ecstasy of ruin."

 

Suah's language is vivid and brilliantly evokes specific, sometimes very obscure feelings. The conversations between characters swerve between the practical and the deeply abstract and philosophical. Overhanging the whole surreal experience is the memory of the military rule of Korea and the ever-present shadow of North Korea. The characters are rarely directly concerned with these things, and yet, their presence crops up: when Ayami describes helicopters flying overhead; the citywide blackouts; when Wolfi, a German tourist, keeps asking to visit a particular area that Ayami repeatedly tells him is inaccessible because it requires passing through North Korea. South Korea isn't really a peninsula, she tells him, it's an island. 

 

It's a short novel, just 152 pages, but I still felt like I'd been on a journey by the time I finished it. I think this would make a great work for discussing in a book club or class, because it's one of those stories where everyone is going to pick up on different details and have different explanations for the various strange phenomena at play. What is this book about? I can't really say. It reminded me a little bit of the short film Genius Loci in how the characters interact with the city and the constantly-changing story landscape. 

 

If you do give it a read, I definitely recommend reading the translator's note at the end, it adds a little something and she explains some of her translating choices. This book, like several of the others from this rec list, presented a translating challenge, I imagine, and I think Smith did an excellent job capturing Suah's surrealist world. This is not the first book of Suah's that Smith has translated and I'm sure her familiarity with Suah's particular writing helped make this such a wonderful translation.

 

Another win from this list!

Crossposted to books