#Bae Suah

[words-and-coffee]

She headed straight to the heart of the darkness, which lacked even a single point of light, and where not even the road beneath her feet could be seen. Like a blind owl, she walked as one with the darkness, undisturbed by it.

Bae Suah, Untold Night and Day (translated by Deborah Smith)

[marcvscicero]

— nowhere to be found by bae suah

[bookloure]

"This book is both a detective novel and a surreal, poetic fever dream." This statement by Deborah Smith in the Translator's Note of the book perfectly sums up Untold Night and Day. In truth, I did oscillate between giving this book 2⭐ (because I didn't understand it) and 5⭐ (because I didn't understand it).

In the end, I settled in a 4.5⭐

Everyone who has read this book probably experienced similar things, but the enjoyment of the book will depend a lot on one's preference. I personally enjoyed the experience, but can understand people who don't. After all, I did go back and forth before finally deciding I liked what Bae Suah put me through.

One Goodreads reviewer wrote that the book feels "like the beginning of a heat stroke." And I agree. I read some parts of this while waiting for a friend in the busy PITX terminal, with hundreds of people walking past me… which heightened the book's surreal style. I highly recommend reading some parts of this book in a liminal space, preferably in the sweltering heat.

You can approach this book in two ways: accept the constant shift of the narrative, allow yourself to be dizzy and swept by confusion, let the dreams and the reality mix into a murk, try and let yourself fail to grasp the meaning of things, and just let everything wash over you—this is what I did.

You can also try to pin this book down, annotate the shit out of it, map out the plot, solve the mystery, figure out who's who, what is a dream and what is not, and what is past and present. I plan to do this on reread. Both, I imagine, would be fun.

Books like this remind me how rewarding and challenging books can be. And it excited me to know that there are books like this that can make me so deeply confused and, at the same time, delighted.

[laddersofsweetmisery]

Last night, I finished Bae Suah's novella Nowhere to be Found and loved it. This is the second book of hers I've read and I'm now desperate to read everything she's ever written.

Favorite words from book:

"Burn me. Pour gasoline over me and set my body on fire. Burn me at the stake like a witch. Wrap me in garbage bags and toss me in the incinerator. I'll turn into dioxin and make my way into your lungs. Stroke my face lightly with a razor blade and suck the blood that comes seeping out. Lap it up like a cat. I want to be covered in blood. I'll cry out in the end and weep for fear of leaving this world without ever once discovering the me inside me, the ugly something inside me. The foul scent of burning hair. The heat."

"It wasn't so different from 1978, and it wasn't any more or less memorable in comparison to 1998. The things that happened in 1988 had also happened in 1978 and would happen again in 1998. The people I met in 1988 were no different from those who bumped shoulders with me in the subway in 1978 and whose apathetic eyes met mine outside of a gas station in the middle of the night in 1998. They were family, and they were the unfamiliar middle class, and they were malnourished soldiers. They were each other's toilets and strangers and cliffs and crows and prisons. They were never anything more than who they were. Third person random."

"I tell him, 'All you have is my emptiness.' "

[cristinaboncea]

Bae Suah - M-am săturat de tine | Recenzie literară

Mi-a plăcut extrem de tare această lectură și pot înțelege de ce a fost inclusă în colecția Romanul secolului XXI. A fost o gură de aer proaspăt, cu o protagonistă considerată în general nesuferită, dar al cărei monolog interior m-a uns pe suflet. Despre ce este vorba în M-am săturat de tine?Ce mi-a plăcut la M-am săturat de tine?Gânduri finale Despre ce este vorba în M-am săturat de…

[quotingmyjourneys]

I am one week away from my twenty-fifth birthday. I hate being that age. That age is neither as fresh and full of life as fifteen years nor as jaded as the afternoon of thirty-five years. I never know what the next day will bring, so I am always uneasy.

— Bae Suah, translated by Sora Kim-Russell (Highway with Green Apples), first pub. 1995, Korea

[mylifeasci-blog]

just something

The heart revolts around its crest, oscillating freely as if amusing itself.

It’s with word which solitude a being, slowly like a cupid’s head, alone. I speak with a heart with a worm with a tender void amusing its depths fustily.

She would breathe and quest her own veins as if prelisting her woe. She wanted to experience her life a granite of death.  

[thegirlwhorunsforthetrain]

Highway with Green Apples by Bae Suah

“I wish you were a different type of girl,” Continue reading Untitled

[words-and-coffee]

In the past, people were vaguely fearful of photographs, believing the camera's exact reproduction of their own image would steal their souls. Not only did these images survive for much longer than their subjects, they were also endowed with an aura of magic the subjects lacked. A superstition, but one whose traces can still be felt today. People sense that the photograph captures an uncanny moment in the interstices of reality, enhancing reality's eeriness, the root of which is unknown, and fixing that moment in place like a death mask. Photography differs from the art of painting in that capturing or exposing such a moment happens neither at the will of the photographer nor the one who is photographed. What is photographed is a ghost moment, clothed in matter. Photography is the dream of comprehensive meaning. Each object has parts of itself that are invisible. This territory, which neither the photographer nor the subject can govern, constitutes the secret kept by the object. Unrelated to the intention of either photographer or subject, within the magic of photography dwells a still, quiet shock. Try to imagine our house one day when we ourselves are no more. Somewhere in that house is the ghost of us, which will pass alone in front of a blind mirror, revealing our own blurred image.

Bae Suah, Untold Night and Day (translated by Deborah Smith)

[marcvscicero]

nowhere to be found - bae suah

[silenthillbunni]

[hundredpocketed]

going on a little holiday w my family and i am just realising that I don't have a book to bring?!?! last summer i read my brilliant friend which was PERFECT and then the year before i read the vegetarian and human acts by han kang on holidays which remain some of my absolute favourite novels! this year i have NO IDEA what to read!! if anybody has a recommendation for an excellent beautiful intense book please let me know!

[famousblueraincoatmp3]

happy birthday to me :D i hope youre all having a great day

[ahaura]

“You were born with a knife in your heart.”

Bae Suah, Nowhere to Be Found, tr. Sora Kim-Russell

[quotingmyjourneys]

Because life has not turned out the way I wanted it to. Because that’s how it always is—as a child, you get no love from your parents, and at school, you get bad grades and never catch anyone’s eye. And after you’re all grown up, you keep peeking in the door of the gynecology clinic, and then wait for an hour, and another hour, at the café where a man has promised to meet you, gulping down several cups of weak coffee before leaving alone in the dark. Then, to top it off, the cat that crosses your path one day on a highway with green apples turns out to be a black cat.

— Bae Suah, translated by Sora Kim-Russell (Highway with Green Apples), first pub. 1995, Korea