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서울의 낮은 언덕들
"Bae Suah offers the chance to un-know—to see the every-day afresh and be defamiliarized with what we believe we know—which is no small offering."—Music & Literature
The meeting between a group of emigrants and a mysterious, wandering actress in an empty train station sets the stage for Recitation, a fragmentary yet lyrical meditation on language, travel, and memory by South Korea's most prominent contemporary female author. As the actress recounts the fascinating story of her stateless existence, an unreliable narrator and the interruptions of her audience challenge traditional notions of storytelling and identity.
The meeting between a group of emigrants and a mysterious, wandering actress in an empty train station sets the stage for Recitation, a fragmentary yet lyrical meditation on language, travel, and memory by South Korea's most prominent contemporary female author. As the actress recounts the fascinating story of her stateless existence, an unreliable narrator and the interruptions of her audience challenge traditional notions of storytelling and identity.
311 pages, Paperback
First published December 10, 2011
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About the author
Bae Suah
16 books372 followersBae Suah, one of the most highly acclaimed contemporary Korean authors, has published more than a dozen works and won several prestigious awards. She has also translated several books from the German, including works by W. G. Sebald, Franz Kafka, and Jenny Erpenbeck. Her first book to appear in English, Nowhere to be Found, was longlisted for a PEN Translation Prize and the Best Translated Book Award.
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July 28, 2017
배수아 (Bae Suah)'s 2011 novel 서울의 낮은 언덕들 (The Low Hills of Seoul) has been translated into English as Recitation by the MBI award-winning translator of The Vegetarian, Deborah Smith. A lengthy extract of the novel's start - and, more sensibly, under the English title that is equivalent to the original Korean - can be found here: https://www.catranslation.org/online-...
Bae Suah's novella Nowhere to Be Found was ony of my favourite reads of 2015 (my review https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...?).
Reading her in a longer-form is both very welcome - on the never have too much of a good thing principle - but the novel isn't quite as taut and controlled as the earlier novella was.
Kyung-hee introduces herself at the novel's start, to the unspecified chorus (Kyung-hee told us) as both a recitation artist:
Back in her hometown, Kyung-hee said, she’d been a stage actor specialising in recitation.
but also a global nomad, part of a special community:
We’ve never seen each other in the flesh, you see, but we’re both part of a kind of community, Kyung-hee explained, which means we let other wanderers stay with us free of charge. If someone comes to visit whichever city I happen to be living in, then I provide them somewhere to stay, and then when I go traveling other people in other cities will let me use their living room, veranda, guest room, attic, or even, on the off chance that they have one, a barn. It all depends on their individual circumstances. So I know nothing about these people aside from their name and the city they live in, and if something comes up so that they can’t come and meet me, well, that’s unfortunate, but there’s nothing to be done. I just have to spend the night at the station, then take the first train to another city the following morning.
The novel centres around Kyung-hee but is told through switching voices, the commenting chorus who met her at the novel's start return at the end when they seek her out in Korea, but we also here, often 2nd hand, accounts from Kyung-hee and various of her acquaintances. It is distinctive of the novel that geographical references are often unclear - Germany, Vienna and Seoul feature but the action, like Kyung-hee herself shifts rather by chance around the globe - and at times tenses and personal relations seem to shift. At one point Kyung-hee recalls how an event caused her to recollecting something that the novel's timeline suggests actually happened after the event; another character is clearly female but then describes herself as her father's son (and incidentally her mother and father seem bemused by her claim that she is their child). In lesser hands one might suspect these were typos, but his shifting base is part of Bae Suah's theme.
Kyung-hee appropriates not only the homes of those she visits but their stories:
I don't spy on the past. But because I have an instinctive preference for stepping unhesitatingly out into a whirlpool of invisible stories which evoke an individual life as one long, unbroken thread, and because for some time now I've been aware that such lives are all around me, addressing me in desolate voices - ah, there are times when I regret that I didn't think of studying a discipline like archaeology or ancient history, then I would be able to clearly make out these whispering of countless bones and stories - regardless of where or not my conjectures have any basis in fact, I'm actually growing even closer to this house, this couple, and to the sleep I experience in the chimney room, the dreams I have them, the dream of the feeling facing he sky. For example the long, deep sleep of the teacher wife which goes on behind the locked front door.
As though it were actually my own, an unfamiliar self from the distant future, Kyung-hee added.
And a key theme is the contrast between the global city-dweller, and those seeking their roots in primitive shaman rites - Kyung-hee ticking both boxes - neither a fit with 2016/17 style nationalism:
I wonder about the collective soul of the widespread and artificially constructed new tribe known as the ‘city dweller’, who is no longer a part of any traditional society or race, and has never at any time held spiritual or religious beliefs which arise from any geographic specificity, or at least beliefs which are current only in a specific region, given that, even in regions where such beliefs had once held sway, the degree and duration of industrialisation meant not only that shamanism had lost its power but that access to collective memories of it had been completely cut off, with each individual inextricably bound up with things that would once have been foreign to them, psychological differences flattened, made to conform to an international standard now long accepted, a globally-current ‘enlightened’ standard that is considered the only one of value; the modern city dweller who has thus lost no few of their native, traditional mythical elements, which defy explanation; the modern city dweller in whom the majority of us can now recognise ourselves.
[...]
It struck me that while some people strive to reach the moon [...] other, very primal, people are constantly directing their lives back towards the cave, their blood, their ancient language, as though answering the call of the spirits.
This is a vague and to some extent forgotten tribal concept, a little closer to the source than that of the broad 'race', which relies on the concept of cities and nations which have large-scale systems and organisations.
The name of the virtual community of home-sharers to which Kyung-hee belongs is Karakorum: the link of the name of this very 21st century community to the ancient Mongol capital (and part of the novel it set in a country which, although not named, appears to be Mongolia) again highlights one of Bae's key themes:
"Whats Karakoram?" I asked, and she told me that it was an organisation which shared houses amongst its members, or else members amongst its houses. Shares houses amongst its members? I repeated, initially unable to grasp what she was saying. You mean sharing houses with complete strangers? Thats right, Maria said. "Karakoram provides houses for wanderers. Through each member agreeing to share their own house with any other member, that is. Anyone who has a house - here, the concept of 'house' applies equally to a single basement room, just a bare place to sleep, as to a mansion - can become a member. Once you're a member, it's your duty to provide a place to stay for Karakorum members from all over the world. No matter who they are.
[...]
What if Karakorum had truly existed? What if there had truly been a wide palace with sixty-four pillars, built of dark green bricks, and an ancient city of black walls and black mountains, in the heart of the steppe wilderness? A city like a divine eye, occupying the entire core of this world even while constantly shifting from place to place. What if there had truly been a city of wandering, which opened its doors to dust-covered wanderers who came from every corner of the sky?"
Bae translated W.G. Sebald from German into Korean and his influence is both implicit but, in this case, explicit in the novel, with parts of his writings on Jorge Luis Borges summarised at length in one section.
At other times, the novel does seem rather random. We're told Kyung-hee answered as she always did whenever she was asked a question of that type: in other words, she blurted out the first thing that popped into her head. and if one were being critical there is times where this seems a little true of the text. One chapter is titled from a sentence in the book which makes no more sense in context:
Absurdly, the sight reminded Kyung-hee of a particular day a long-time ago, whose morning had been spent diligently studying the Reader's Digest she'd been given at the bus stop on the way to school, while in the evening she;d watched a film called The Effect of Gamma Rays on Main-in-the-Moon Marigolds...
Although at other times the language is starkly beautiful, the images cohering such as this description of Kyung-hee's voice when those seeking her finally hear a recitation performance on the radio:
"It was a language of muttering which recalled rough, hard, broken rocks and earth and bleached bones and grainy sand, the sound of a two-year old horse's tendons trembling, the sleekness of a smoothly-eroded limestone floor, a cave's bat breathing, a flute made of swan's bones, a planetary ring of colliding rock and ice kernels, whispering made up of hard ironware with irregular edges, the sound of bones burning in a fire and soot gusting up into a storm cloud, a bearskin drum.
And as with Nowhere to be Found there are moments of brutality, e.g. Kyung-hee's description of her very odd childhood with parents who show her pictures of a prison for bad children (which she later realises were of Auschwitz) and her own rather bizarre rationalisation of their approach:
"When it comes down to it, I don't think there's all that great a difference between someone saying, hey kid, have some of this fruit, or shouting, if your mouth twitches like that one more time, I'll cut your lips into pieces with scissors, you little bitch! Since, to a certain extent, language is no more than a contrived, man-made symbol."
Recommended, albeit I would direct those wanting to try Bae Suah to Nowhere to be Found first.
A very worthwhile discussion between Bae Suah and Deborah Smith can be found at the March 2017 edition of The White Review
http://www.thewhitereview.org/intervi...
Bae Suah's novella Nowhere to Be Found was ony of my favourite reads of 2015 (my review https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...?).
Reading her in a longer-form is both very welcome - on the never have too much of a good thing principle - but the novel isn't quite as taut and controlled as the earlier novella was.
Kyung-hee introduces herself at the novel's start, to the unspecified chorus (Kyung-hee told us) as both a recitation artist:
Back in her hometown, Kyung-hee said, she’d been a stage actor specialising in recitation.
but also a global nomad, part of a special community:
We’ve never seen each other in the flesh, you see, but we’re both part of a kind of community, Kyung-hee explained, which means we let other wanderers stay with us free of charge. If someone comes to visit whichever city I happen to be living in, then I provide them somewhere to stay, and then when I go traveling other people in other cities will let me use their living room, veranda, guest room, attic, or even, on the off chance that they have one, a barn. It all depends on their individual circumstances. So I know nothing about these people aside from their name and the city they live in, and if something comes up so that they can’t come and meet me, well, that’s unfortunate, but there’s nothing to be done. I just have to spend the night at the station, then take the first train to another city the following morning.
The novel centres around Kyung-hee but is told through switching voices, the commenting chorus who met her at the novel's start return at the end when they seek her out in Korea, but we also here, often 2nd hand, accounts from Kyung-hee and various of her acquaintances. It is distinctive of the novel that geographical references are often unclear - Germany, Vienna and Seoul feature but the action, like Kyung-hee herself shifts rather by chance around the globe - and at times tenses and personal relations seem to shift. At one point Kyung-hee recalls how an event caused her to recollecting something that the novel's timeline suggests actually happened after the event; another character is clearly female but then describes herself as her father's son (and incidentally her mother and father seem bemused by her claim that she is their child). In lesser hands one might suspect these were typos, but his shifting base is part of Bae Suah's theme.
Kyung-hee appropriates not only the homes of those she visits but their stories:
I don't spy on the past. But because I have an instinctive preference for stepping unhesitatingly out into a whirlpool of invisible stories which evoke an individual life as one long, unbroken thread, and because for some time now I've been aware that such lives are all around me, addressing me in desolate voices - ah, there are times when I regret that I didn't think of studying a discipline like archaeology or ancient history, then I would be able to clearly make out these whispering of countless bones and stories - regardless of where or not my conjectures have any basis in fact, I'm actually growing even closer to this house, this couple, and to the sleep I experience in the chimney room, the dreams I have them, the dream of the feeling facing he sky. For example the long, deep sleep of the teacher wife which goes on behind the locked front door.
As though it were actually my own, an unfamiliar self from the distant future, Kyung-hee added.
And a key theme is the contrast between the global city-dweller, and those seeking their roots in primitive shaman rites - Kyung-hee ticking both boxes - neither a fit with 2016/17 style nationalism:
I wonder about the collective soul of the widespread and artificially constructed new tribe known as the ‘city dweller’, who is no longer a part of any traditional society or race, and has never at any time held spiritual or religious beliefs which arise from any geographic specificity, or at least beliefs which are current only in a specific region, given that, even in regions where such beliefs had once held sway, the degree and duration of industrialisation meant not only that shamanism had lost its power but that access to collective memories of it had been completely cut off, with each individual inextricably bound up with things that would once have been foreign to them, psychological differences flattened, made to conform to an international standard now long accepted, a globally-current ‘enlightened’ standard that is considered the only one of value; the modern city dweller who has thus lost no few of their native, traditional mythical elements, which defy explanation; the modern city dweller in whom the majority of us can now recognise ourselves.
[...]
It struck me that while some people strive to reach the moon [...] other, very primal, people are constantly directing their lives back towards the cave, their blood, their ancient language, as though answering the call of the spirits.
This is a vague and to some extent forgotten tribal concept, a little closer to the source than that of the broad 'race', which relies on the concept of cities and nations which have large-scale systems and organisations.
The name of the virtual community of home-sharers to which Kyung-hee belongs is Karakorum: the link of the name of this very 21st century community to the ancient Mongol capital (and part of the novel it set in a country which, although not named, appears to be Mongolia) again highlights one of Bae's key themes:
"Whats Karakoram?" I asked, and she told me that it was an organisation which shared houses amongst its members, or else members amongst its houses. Shares houses amongst its members? I repeated, initially unable to grasp what she was saying. You mean sharing houses with complete strangers? Thats right, Maria said. "Karakoram provides houses for wanderers. Through each member agreeing to share their own house with any other member, that is. Anyone who has a house - here, the concept of 'house' applies equally to a single basement room, just a bare place to sleep, as to a mansion - can become a member. Once you're a member, it's your duty to provide a place to stay for Karakorum members from all over the world. No matter who they are.
[...]
What if Karakorum had truly existed? What if there had truly been a wide palace with sixty-four pillars, built of dark green bricks, and an ancient city of black walls and black mountains, in the heart of the steppe wilderness? A city like a divine eye, occupying the entire core of this world even while constantly shifting from place to place. What if there had truly been a city of wandering, which opened its doors to dust-covered wanderers who came from every corner of the sky?"
Bae translated W.G. Sebald from German into Korean and his influence is both implicit but, in this case, explicit in the novel, with parts of his writings on Jorge Luis Borges summarised at length in one section.
At other times, the novel does seem rather random. We're told Kyung-hee answered as she always did whenever she was asked a question of that type: in other words, she blurted out the first thing that popped into her head. and if one were being critical there is times where this seems a little true of the text. One chapter is titled from a sentence in the book which makes no more sense in context:
Absurdly, the sight reminded Kyung-hee of a particular day a long-time ago, whose morning had been spent diligently studying the Reader's Digest she'd been given at the bus stop on the way to school, while in the evening she;d watched a film called The Effect of Gamma Rays on Main-in-the-Moon Marigolds...
Although at other times the language is starkly beautiful, the images cohering such as this description of Kyung-hee's voice when those seeking her finally hear a recitation performance on the radio:
"It was a language of muttering which recalled rough, hard, broken rocks and earth and bleached bones and grainy sand, the sound of a two-year old horse's tendons trembling, the sleekness of a smoothly-eroded limestone floor, a cave's bat breathing, a flute made of swan's bones, a planetary ring of colliding rock and ice kernels, whispering made up of hard ironware with irregular edges, the sound of bones burning in a fire and soot gusting up into a storm cloud, a bearskin drum.
And as with Nowhere to be Found there are moments of brutality, e.g. Kyung-hee's description of her very odd childhood with parents who show her pictures of a prison for bad children (which she later realises were of Auschwitz) and her own rather bizarre rationalisation of their approach:
"When it comes down to it, I don't think there's all that great a difference between someone saying, hey kid, have some of this fruit, or shouting, if your mouth twitches like that one more time, I'll cut your lips into pieces with scissors, you little bitch! Since, to a certain extent, language is no more than a contrived, man-made symbol."
Recommended, albeit I would direct those wanting to try Bae Suah to Nowhere to be Found first.
A very worthwhile discussion between Bae Suah and Deborah Smith can be found at the March 2017 edition of The White Review
http://www.thewhitereview.org/intervi...
August 30, 2019
Late last month I came across this very brief article recommending two women authors in translation that I was not familiar with (and the third is Valeria Luiselli who is amazing).
So I promptly put in some ILL requests; this was one of them (and Josefine Klougart was another, I'm planning on starting it today). I was most excited for Bae Suah, based on: "Bae Suah is one of the hottest, most experimental voices coming out of South Korea right now. She’s published numerous novels and short story collections and has won several prestigious awards. Suah is heavily influenced by her work as a translator, having translated several books from German, including works by W.G. Sebald, Franz Kafka, and Jenny Erpenbeck."
That sounds awesome! Plus, this is published by one of my favorite current publishers (Deep Vellum)!
Unfortunately this left me a bit cold. Bae Suah's writing is top level - so I'll be checking out other books by her - but this book in particular didn't do much for me. It is hazy, dreamlike, and surrealistic - these are all really good things! - but the pacing is fairly glacial, and the concluding pages didn't really do enough to justify the time spent getting there. I can totally see why there are people who love this book, it just wasn't really for me.
So I promptly put in some ILL requests; this was one of them (and Josefine Klougart was another, I'm planning on starting it today). I was most excited for Bae Suah, based on: "Bae Suah is one of the hottest, most experimental voices coming out of South Korea right now. She’s published numerous novels and short story collections and has won several prestigious awards. Suah is heavily influenced by her work as a translator, having translated several books from German, including works by W.G. Sebald, Franz Kafka, and Jenny Erpenbeck."
That sounds awesome! Plus, this is published by one of my favorite current publishers (Deep Vellum)!
Unfortunately this left me a bit cold. Bae Suah's writing is top level - so I'll be checking out other books by her - but this book in particular didn't do much for me. It is hazy, dreamlike, and surrealistic - these are all really good things! - but the pacing is fairly glacial, and the concluding pages didn't really do enough to justify the time spent getting there. I can totally see why there are people who love this book, it just wasn't really for me.
January 17, 2022
Suah is my favorite Korean author and one of my favorite authors currently working. Her prose meanders a lot but it is constantly engaging. Most of the time, her characters and settings are far removed from Korea, making passing reference to their lineage while traveling abroad. Most of this novel takes place in Austria. We follow the main character Kyung-hee's thought processes and travails as she navigates society, learning about the system of travelers who share housing (called a Karakorum here). The protagonist shares her life with strangers in both a storytelling sense and a literal sense. The free-associative approach to the writing is addictive and easy to follow. Even when geography and timeline are unclear I was happy to exist in the moment with the book. Though much of the author's work lacks resolution, conflict, and plot, there is magic in her words. They are capable of transporting me, etching out a slice of life I have never lived, and serve to calm my restless mind and nurture my love of adventure. There is much description of cities, shamanistic customs, historical locales and some literary critique of German-language authors, from whom Suah draws inspiration (and whom she translates into Korean) like Sebald. A brilliant mix of internal monologue, wandering narrative focus, experimental cohesiveness, and solid, fascinating voice.
June 26, 2025
This is a confounding novel, meandering, nostalgic, cerebral, and at times, surreal. The novel revolves around Kyung-hee, a recitation actress (though few people seem to know what that profession entails. Many assume it is a kind of actress but Kyung-hee insists that she can't act; anyone hearing her voice in a dialogue would immediately see her voice as inauthentic. All we really learn is that she is soft-spoken and constantly afraid of developing a speech impediment, but only occasionally delivers small recitations). She has just arrived at a train station in a foreign city and is waiting for a stranger to pick her up. She sits on a bench alone when the narrators of the novel—a collective 'we'—approach her and decide to invite her to their place. There Kyung-hee recounts the story of her travels and takes over as the narrator for most of the remainder of the novel.
Kyung-hee is a kind of international flaneur, roaming German cities and talking with strangers, lost in speculation. As she tells the group who has picked her up, she is part of an international share-housing organization whose members offer up their space to other itinerant members. Kyung-hee describes her nomadic wandering from city to city, reflecting on chance memories that occurred to her, talking with nameless travelers whom she just refers to by her own chosen sobriquets ("The man who taught me German", "Mr Nobody", "the teaching couple", "the Healer", or "The East Asian man"), and reporting the conversations they had—about the incidental nature of names, the alien foreignness of one's parents, the irrevocable death of ancient languages, the definition of a goshawk, the difference between country- and city-dwellers, the ineffability and interpenetration of all cities, the arbitrariness of language (one spectacular example is the line: "I don't think there's all that great a difference between someone saying, hey kid, try some of this fruit, and shouting, if your mouth twitches like that one more time, I'll cut your lips into pieces with scissors. Since, to a certain extent, language is no more than a contrived, man-made symbol like traffic lights or a flight attendant's uniform"). It's delirious and flighty and weird.
As Kyung-hee recedes further into her memories—and her memories of other people's memories—her own voice begins to vanish. It becomes difficult to know at times whose memory is being told, and at what place and point in time. The reciter disappears in her recitation, receding further into her reminiscences, her words and other people's words coalescing into a dreamlike monologue. Sometimes she confuses events with moments in films. One time she semi-convinced mistakes a man in the street for the Dalai Lama. Sometimes she deliberately misleads the listener, going by the name of Maria (another mysterious traveler whom Kyung-hee admires but who never really appears in the story but whose name is often dropped enigmatically—for example when Kyung-hee tells a man that Maria didn't want to meet with him that day and then reassures him "she often used to say that she wanted to go to the country where you live, to see a dead horse.") It's all strange and hypnotic. There are few real narrative events (a memory of Austrian police-officers following her to apartment to inspect her passport, a memory of her sister trying to strangle her, a memory of the healer on a talk-show). At times, different moments are told concurrently, all collapsing into a kaleidoscope.
In a footnote, Bae Suah cites a line of Borges quoted in Sebald's Rings of Saturn ("According to the literature of Orbis Tertius, the most important foundation of the Tlön school of philosophy can be said to be the negation of time") and it announces the dual aesthetic of the book—the Borgesian imagination of a mental city (the inhabitants of the so-called city of Tlön—much like Kyung-hee—do not believe in objective reality and deny the existence of space, time and single selfhood), and the Sebaldian idea of memory and history overlaying and palimpsesting one another. Bae Suah traces these ideas in her own stories within stories, as individual identities and memories intermingle and overwrite one another.
I found a number of moments mesmerizing, profound, suspenseful and even hilarious, but a lot of it—especially the Egyptian mythology and the story of the reincarnated shaman—was too kooky.
Kyung-hee is a kind of international flaneur, roaming German cities and talking with strangers, lost in speculation. As she tells the group who has picked her up, she is part of an international share-housing organization whose members offer up their space to other itinerant members. Kyung-hee describes her nomadic wandering from city to city, reflecting on chance memories that occurred to her, talking with nameless travelers whom she just refers to by her own chosen sobriquets ("The man who taught me German", "Mr Nobody", "the teaching couple", "the Healer", or "The East Asian man"), and reporting the conversations they had—about the incidental nature of names, the alien foreignness of one's parents, the irrevocable death of ancient languages, the definition of a goshawk, the difference between country- and city-dwellers, the ineffability and interpenetration of all cities, the arbitrariness of language (one spectacular example is the line: "I don't think there's all that great a difference between someone saying, hey kid, try some of this fruit, and shouting, if your mouth twitches like that one more time, I'll cut your lips into pieces with scissors. Since, to a certain extent, language is no more than a contrived, man-made symbol like traffic lights or a flight attendant's uniform"). It's delirious and flighty and weird.
As Kyung-hee recedes further into her memories—and her memories of other people's memories—her own voice begins to vanish. It becomes difficult to know at times whose memory is being told, and at what place and point in time. The reciter disappears in her recitation, receding further into her reminiscences, her words and other people's words coalescing into a dreamlike monologue. Sometimes she confuses events with moments in films. One time she semi-convinced mistakes a man in the street for the Dalai Lama. Sometimes she deliberately misleads the listener, going by the name of Maria (another mysterious traveler whom Kyung-hee admires but who never really appears in the story but whose name is often dropped enigmatically—for example when Kyung-hee tells a man that Maria didn't want to meet with him that day and then reassures him "she often used to say that she wanted to go to the country where you live, to see a dead horse.") It's all strange and hypnotic. There are few real narrative events (a memory of Austrian police-officers following her to apartment to inspect her passport, a memory of her sister trying to strangle her, a memory of the healer on a talk-show). At times, different moments are told concurrently, all collapsing into a kaleidoscope.
In a footnote, Bae Suah cites a line of Borges quoted in Sebald's Rings of Saturn ("According to the literature of Orbis Tertius, the most important foundation of the Tlön school of philosophy can be said to be the negation of time") and it announces the dual aesthetic of the book—the Borgesian imagination of a mental city (the inhabitants of the so-called city of Tlön—much like Kyung-hee—do not believe in objective reality and deny the existence of space, time and single selfhood), and the Sebaldian idea of memory and history overlaying and palimpsesting one another. Bae Suah traces these ideas in her own stories within stories, as individual identities and memories intermingle and overwrite one another.
I found a number of moments mesmerizing, profound, suspenseful and even hilarious, but a lot of it—especially the Egyptian mythology and the story of the reincarnated shaman—was too kooky.
August 17, 2019
Absolutely spellbound. What does it all mean? I have a little under a week to put some thoughts onto paper for an essay contest, but I can say for now that this is probably up there now among my favorite books of all time. “I become a lupin, blooming on the low hills.”
In a stunning act of online vulnerability here's an essay I wrote for the GW Institute for Korean Studies .. don't tear me apart too much if it's bad
In a stunning act of online vulnerability here's an essay I wrote for the GW Institute for Korean Studies .. don't tear me apart too much if it's bad
March 28, 2017
Bae Suah and I have parted ways for the time being. About halfway through "Recitation" I found I simply didn't care anymore, wasn't curious enough to see where Bae Suah was headed. Some of the times when this happens it simply means that it's just not the right time for me to be on the same wavelength as this book. Maybe I have failed it, instead of the other way round. So "Recitation" goes back on my books-to-be-read list and one day I'll take another stab at it. Sometimes the way forward is clearer the second time around.
November 8, 2018
I almost didn't pick up this book because of some lukewarm reviews here on Goodreads. I am so glad I gave this book a try. I absolutely loved it.
This book is a challenge to read at times, with rambling prose and shifting stories woven throughout the novel. However, I found each page engaging and worthwhile. I look forward to reading it again in the future. I would strongly recommend this book to fans of surrealist literature.
Bae Suah has crafted a beautiful and bizarre novel. I look forward to reading more of her work.
This book is a challenge to read at times, with rambling prose and shifting stories woven throughout the novel. However, I found each page engaging and worthwhile. I look forward to reading it again in the future. I would strongly recommend this book to fans of surrealist literature.
Bae Suah has crafted a beautiful and bizarre novel. I look forward to reading more of her work.
February 2, 2017
"It is a challenging yet cognitively engaging and rewarding read.
"... This is not a book for lazy readers; Bae expects us to show up ready to work. Her handsome prose, however, is never an obstacle.
"... Recitation will make Bae’s anglophone readers and other fans of post-modern fiction eagerly await the publication of more of her novels in English."
-- from my review in New York Journal of Books
"... This is not a book for lazy readers; Bae expects us to show up ready to work. Her handsome prose, however, is never an obstacle.
"... Recitation will make Bae’s anglophone readers and other fans of post-modern fiction eagerly await the publication of more of her novels in English."
-- from my review in New York Journal of Books
February 7, 2017
This book reads like a dream. It is beautifully written. It is bizarre and will keep you wondering what is really going on. I really loved the feel of it. The language and use of descriptions is inspiring. For my #readingaroundtheworld friends it qualifies for South Korea.
November 6, 2017
bizarre and rambling and poetic and brilliant and confounding and ephemeral... i love books like this, which seem to have no purpose, no plot, no trajectory typical to a novel... beautiful prose, intermingled with mini-tales and happenings... amazingly derivative, non-genre, and a joy to find...
September 17, 2018
did not finished this one, stopped somewhere in the middle. weirdly written, I couldn't follow the plot - I do not know it it's translations fault, but it was really a struggle
May 20, 2017
Reading this book was a surreal experience unlike any other book I've read (in a good way), which I think is a testament to Suah's writing and Smith's translation. I was particularly struck by the co-existence of multiple points of reference which couldn't co-exist in any traditional concept of narrative continuity or linear chronology, and how subtle the contradictions were. A few examples would be when a character inexplicably changes the pronoun they refer to themselves during a stream-of-consciousness passage, or when an event seems to occur both before and after its description by the narrator. These sorts of things happen more frequently in the latter half of the book especially.
As I was reading the final chapter, it occurred to me that this effect was similar in a lot of ways to the paintings Giorgio De Chirico created between 1910-1920, whose multiple vanishing points render scenes with impossible geometric depths, in which small numbers of human figures are isolated - unreal images creating a sense of mystery, much in the same way Suah isolates the wandering Kyung-hee, who's recounting of her own tales suggest multiple histories. The healer in Recitation also references Nietzsche, who was a big influence on De Chirico's work - there are a lot of apparent connections. So when in the final chapter Suah references one of De Chirico's paintings at a crucial point of uncertainty in the unfolding of the narrative, everything seemed to fall into place. It doesn't resolve the contradictions or sense of mystery in any concrete way, but it frames them in a beautiful and subtle way that I found very affecting.
This was the first book of Suah's that I've read, but i'm keen to check out more now. Highly recommended!
As I was reading the final chapter, it occurred to me that this effect was similar in a lot of ways to the paintings Giorgio De Chirico created between 1910-1920, whose multiple vanishing points render scenes with impossible geometric depths, in which small numbers of human figures are isolated - unreal images creating a sense of mystery, much in the same way Suah isolates the wandering Kyung-hee, who's recounting of her own tales suggest multiple histories. The healer in Recitation also references Nietzsche, who was a big influence on De Chirico's work - there are a lot of apparent connections. So when in the final chapter Suah references one of De Chirico's paintings at a crucial point of uncertainty in the unfolding of the narrative, everything seemed to fall into place. It doesn't resolve the contradictions or sense of mystery in any concrete way, but it frames them in a beautiful and subtle way that I found very affecting.
This was the first book of Suah's that I've read, but i'm keen to check out more now. Highly recommended!
December 22, 2018
An ambitious and difficult novel which challenges the reader to construct a single, coherent story out of a series of fragments in which time, place, characters and narrator are constantly shifting and often only vaguely identified. It begins with a Korean expat couple encountering a woman at a train station in an unidentifiable European city and, learning that she was supposed to meet someone who was going to let her stay in his apartment overnight but hadn’t shown up, invite her to stay with them. They get to talking with her and soon learn that she is Korean (they had started out speaking German and thought she might be Mongolian) and that they are all from Seoul. She – her name is Kyung-hee – reveals that she a recitation actress and also a traveler. She explains that at some point she learned that her German teacher, whom she had parted ways with some years ago and never saw again, had died, and that “after that everything was irresolvably depressing, and neither happiness nor unhappiness could touch her anymore, and so she suddenly decided, though it was impossible, that she needed to go in search of him, she needed to travel.“ (p. 7). The book ends with the same Korean expat couple going to Seoul to learn more about Kyung-hee, and actually managing to find her. She is giving a performance in a small theatre of a dramatic piece called “The Saora Shaman’s wife”, about a woman who sets out to bring her newly dead husband back from the land of the dead. The book ends (almost) with the piece, and it is clear that it describes Kyung-hee’s life in mythic form, she being the shaman’s wife and her lost German teacher being the shaman (or at least one of his incarnations): “He was my eternal husband, my ancestor, my shaman” (p. 272). But there is much more than this to the piece, and very much more to Kyung-hee’s life as related in the course of the book, and there are many more connections to be made between them and the barren worlds they inhabit.
October 22, 2017
"Kyung-hee said that in her hometown, she’d been a theatre actor specialising in recitation Several times already now, she’d had the idea of visiting the houses she’d left behind. Grasshoppers spring up around her feet, transparent carapaces propelled into the air as she crosses the dirt yard and approaches the cement buildings, their desiccated structures hard and dry as stale bread, and riddled with holes. She peers through the window into the ground-floor flat, where a naked bulb casts a cold, orange light. Objects devoid of life or utility crowd the interior. A table, a cupboard. A vase, a bed. Chairs. Clothes lacking bodies to give them shape. The chill impression of those dearly missed rental houses, whose occupants were only ever passing through. In reality, though, she never once went back to any of the places she’d left behind, and there was something peculiar about the way she only drew them again and again in her imagination, like a hometown whose precise location has grown uncertain over time."
May 2, 2018
I enjoyed this book. It reminded me of Wittgenstein's Mistress by David Markson. More than simply an unreliable narrator, there is a sense of the absence of progression or chronology. It's a hard read, but I did enjoy, especially as the meaning slowly came through at the end. I wish I had time to read this book again, I would probably be able to give this book better rating, since this book needs a careful reading of the meaning, which only appears clearly in the last sections. As such, I feel like I'm only reviewing the parts rather than the whole. The memory more than the act of reading. However, to read the same thing twice, with the ending informing the beginning, the reader being informed and informing the story, it was probably Suah's intention. So yeah, that's what this book is like.
April 23, 2018
Though very well written this is a book extremely difficult to read. I would recommend to read it as different stories. I didn’t enjoy its reading but have to say that right in the middle of the book , the description about Kyung-hee’s parents, how she was brought up, the terrible way how they treated her, the relationship with her sister, her fears and loneliness, touched me incredibly. It definitively makes me think this is a biographical passage and I feel so sorry for Bae Suah.. After this Vienna passage the reading gets more difficult and dense, it is really hard to finish reading it.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
May 29, 2019
This book is a swirling mass of consciousness, breathing and pulsing like a screensaver. An organism that grows spikes and pierces your memory, experience, presence, and absorbs them as the meaning of its own words. It repeats words like they are pressure points in this swelling mass of meaning. Names and people and places fold over each other like a blanket in the ocean. It is remarkable that something so sentient can come out of a linear sequence of words.
August 29, 2018
This was not my kind of book. A long, complicated, and often incoherent stream of consciousness from an amorphous narrator. I’m glad I read it, to break out of my normal genres and to introduce myself to one of South Korea’s highly acclaimed authors. But it was definitely not my flavor.
Want to read
February 9, 2017(recommended by Unabridged Books)
March 1, 2018
I don’t think I’m mystic or surrealist enough to understand this book.
April 5, 2019
Amazing. Reminded me of Rachel Cusk meets Don Delillo. I could read books like this forever
January 11, 2020
The next to last Korean novel for the group I am in on Goodreads (moving to Arabic writings in March), this is the best work I've read by Bae Suah. It is the story of a Korean "recitation actress", Kyung-hee, who has spent her life traveling, often on foot, around the world. Although not in first person, the story is mainly told as the reminiscences of Kyung-hee, told to a group of foreign exiles she runs into by accident. The structure is more complicated, in that she tells stories of other people as they told them to her, and it sometimes gets several layers deep, which gives it a fragmentary and confusing feeling. The farther along one reads, the stranger the story becomes, and although the reader can reconstruct a possible narrative, the most important parts remain ambiguous, and we are never sure whether events actually happened the way Kyung-hee describes them. As in all her stories, there is a deliberate confusion of time, based on her theory that past and future are imaginary and only exist in the present as wish and memory.
There is much discussion of the nature of travel and the idea that travelers are a kind of separate nationality (Korakorum), which reminded me very strongly of another novel I have read recently, Olga Tokarczuk's Flights; I doubt that there was any direct influence, since that was written in Polish and this in Korean, and both were written before either was translated into a language the other might know; but reviews of both books suggest they were both influenced strongly by W.G. Sebald (whom Bae translated into Korean) so that might explain the similarities. I am adding Sebald to my TBR list.
There is much discussion of the nature of travel and the idea that travelers are a kind of separate nationality (Korakorum), which reminded me very strongly of another novel I have read recently, Olga Tokarczuk's Flights; I doubt that there was any direct influence, since that was written in Polish and this in Korean, and both were written before either was translated into a language the other might know; but reviews of both books suggest they were both influenced strongly by W.G. Sebald (whom Bae translated into Korean) so that might explain the similarities. I am adding Sebald to my TBR list.
January 6, 2022
This book follows Kyung-hee who is a traveler that used to work in recitation. She travels and stays at peoples houses through a group where people share their living spaces with other travelers. This book goes through the different places she visits such as Berlin and Vienna, as well as the different people she meets along the way. Each conversation she has lends to important conversations or life lessons. Although it was sometimes hard to follow where she had traveled to or where she was at in the story, you are still able to see how no matter where you go a city is a city. The book had some good quotes and worked through some important aspects of life and relationships. As the book goes on, Kyung-hee’s illness which she mentions is possibly hereditary starts to take over. Towards the end there is a girl claiming to be her daughter who finds her, but Kyung-hee explains that she never had a daughter. Multiple people tried to find Kyung-hee but were never able to which leaves you wondering if she is even real. It reminds you of when police tried to check her passport and said it is common for people to be mistaken for others and that they probably mistakes her for a different Kyung-hee who traveled to Germany. Is the woman the daughter found really her mother or a woman who she was just told is her mother? That’s something you have to decide yourself as that aspect is a bit of an open ending. This book can be a bit confusing and is one I would probably need to read again in order to better understand it.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
October 25, 2019
“왜냐하면 걸어간다는 것은 일종의 비언어적 정당성을 획득하는 유일한 방법이고, 지금 이시대에 행할 수 있는 가장 나 자체인 것이며, 마음과 육체를 모두 포괄하는 전체적인 묘사라고 생각되었으니까요” 22p
“그러나 어느 순간부터, 도시를 하나하나 지나쳐서 걸어가다 보면, 이 모든 다른 얼굴과 자태의 도시들 사이를 관통하는 보이지 않는 시공의 혈관이 있어서, 그것은 일종의 정신의 공항 같은 것인데, 그것을 통해서 도시들이 동시에 살고 있다는 생각이 들어. 그리고 각자 별개인 도시들이 실제로는 아주 완전히 별개의 것이 아니라 서로 마주치고 관통하며 때로는 무의식중에 겹쳐질 수도 있음을. 이 생과 저 생도 마찬가지겠지. 내가 아직 이 생에 완전히 도착하기 전에, 전차가 내 최후의 육신 위를 지나가는 것을 보았다는 생각과 함께. 그러므로 우리는, 어쩌면 지금 이 순간에 나 자신을 온전히 바치기 위해서, 반드시 온 정신을 한곳으로 집중할 필요가 없을지도 몰라. 내가 나에게로 집중하면 집중할수록 나는 점점 파생하고, 또 그런 생각을 하면 할수록 나는 동시에 수많은 자아로 분열되면서 아득해지지. “ 116p
“마리아는 말했어. 우리가 무엇을 결정하는 데 유일한 장애물은 바로 우리 자신이라고. 네가 그곳으로 갈 수 없는 유일한 장애는 너 자신인 거야. 그리고 네가 어느 구체적인 한 개인에게 이 세상의 다른 이에게보다 더 많이 잘못할 수 있을 거라는 상상은, 네가 무언가를 실제로 결정할 수 있으리라는 것, 그 결정이 너의 실제에 어떤 실제적인 영향을 미치리라는 생각과 마찬가지로 그야말로 너의 상상에 불과해.” 124p
“그러나 어느 순간부터, 도시를 하나하나 지나쳐서 걸어가다 보면, 이 모든 다른 얼굴과 자태의 도시들 사이를 관통하는 보이지 않는 시공의 혈관이 있어서, 그것은 일종의 정신의 공항 같은 것인데, 그것을 통해서 도시들이 동시에 살고 있다는 생각이 들어. 그리고 각자 별개인 도시들이 실제로는 아주 완전히 별개의 것이 아니라 서로 마주치고 관통하며 때로는 무의식중에 겹쳐질 수도 있음을. 이 생과 저 생도 마찬가지겠지. 내가 아직 이 생에 완전히 도착하기 전에, 전차가 내 최후의 육신 위를 지나가는 것을 보았다는 생각과 함께. 그러므로 우리는, 어쩌면 지금 이 순간에 나 자신을 온전히 바치기 위해서, 반드시 온 정신을 한곳으로 집중할 필요가 없을지도 몰라. 내가 나에게로 집중하면 집중할수록 나는 점점 파생하고, 또 그런 생각을 하면 할수록 나는 동시에 수많은 자아로 분열되면서 아득해지지. “ 116p
“마리아는 말했어. 우리가 무엇을 결정하는 데 유일한 장애물은 바로 우리 자신이라고. 네가 그곳으로 갈 수 없는 유일한 장애는 너 자신인 거야. 그리고 네가 어느 구체적인 한 개인에게 이 세상의 다른 이에게보다 더 많이 잘못할 수 있을 거라는 상상은, 네가 무언가를 실제로 결정할 수 있으리라는 것, 그 결정이 너의 실제에 어떤 실제적인 영향을 미치리라는 생각과 마찬가지로 그야말로 너의 상상에 불과해.” 124p
September 22, 2021
I was recc'd this because I loved Young-moon Jung's Vaseline Buddha which was also a weird, Korean, rambling stream of consciousness. However Recitation just did not live up to the hype.
I found this ridiculously difficult to read; I have never felt so illiterate as I did during this. It was a struggle just to understand each sentence and how it linked to the sentence prior. I'm not sure if the Korean version is similarly over-stuffed or if it's a translation issue (Deborah Smith's other translation work - Han Kang's The Vegetarian left me similarly cold) but either way I didn't enjoy reading any part of this.
In fact, I finished it literally five minutes ago and the story has already left my mind, like trying to remember a dream as it slips away.
I found this ridiculously difficult to read; I have never felt so illiterate as I did during this. It was a struggle just to understand each sentence and how it linked to the sentence prior. I'm not sure if the Korean version is similarly over-stuffed or if it's a translation issue (Deborah Smith's other translation work - Han Kang's The Vegetarian left me similarly cold) but either way I didn't enjoy reading any part of this.
In fact, I finished it literally five minutes ago and the story has already left my mind, like trying to remember a dream as it slips away.
August 4, 2023
I adore Untold Night and Day. I think Bae Suah was fantastic with it. The prose was exactly what it needed to be. Recitation falls far short of this expectation, and I think it may have something to do with how long it is. 277 pages is way too long for a story like this, with its extremely heavy prose and foggy narrative structure. I wanted to love this, like I lived Untold Night and Day, but Recitation felt like it was written by a different person entirely.
2.25 stars.
2.25 stars.
August 2, 2020
i love bae suah's evocative, meandering sentences but this hinged too much on woo-woo shamanistic plot turns for my liking; think she does something here that's similar to david mitchell's approach to reincarnation / incorporeal travelling souls in ghostwritten or cloud atlas, but without the satisfaction of cogent story.
Read
May 9, 2020I don't really know what that was. Going to sit with it for a bit. Similar themes and imagery as Untold Night and Day but a lot longer and significantly weirder.
May 1, 2021
It's fine to mimic flight so long as there is an eventual landing.
January 19, 2024
really confused as to what is actually the plot
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