The Mookse and the Gripes discussion

Nowhere to Be Found
by Bae Suah
translated from the Korean by Sora Kim-Russell
South Korea



A nameless narrator passes through her life, searching for meaning and connection in experiences she barely feels. For her, time and identity blur, and all action is reaction. She can’t quite understand what motivates others to take life seriously enough to focus on anything—for her existence is a loosely woven tapestry of fleeting concepts. From losing her virginity to mindless jobs and a splintered, unsupportive family, the lessons learned have less to do with the reality we all share and more to do with the truth of the imagination, which is where the narrator focuses to discover herself.

-Bae relates that distant “me alone” to us with an almost preternatural poetic vision and an architect’s structural precision. The only fully inhabited space in Nowhere to Be Found is what Bae described in the same interview as the “landscape of my youth,” which she then clarified: “anxiety.” Another symptom of the narrator’s fernweh is her inability to hold down a conversation with friends, family, acquaintances or lovers, and Bae and Kim-Russell’s dialogue is convincingly stilted. Bae’s protagonist becomes truly unsettling: moving furtively through the city, trusting no one, shunning companionship, each relating only to her own thoughts, without any explanations for her actions — he is a law unto herself; an island, never anywhere to be found because there is no one to witness her. She is, in effect, a ghost, and appropriately enough this word appears for the first time in the last scene, “the center of [her] bleak hour” where she spots, in the flesh, an allegedly murderous couple she had read about (much earlier in the novel) on an old wanted sign: “It is so dark out that I see them brushing past the car like ghosts, but he [her companion] does not.” By the end of Nowhere, the narrator has fully assumed her condition as a ghostly, impervious being: “And that is how I became an absolutely meaningless thing and survived time,” she concludes. ~Sophie Hughes in Music & Literature

-Nowhere to Be Found is a compact, personal account of anomie and withdrawal in a time of rapid social and economic change (something that bubbles constantly in the novel-background). The narrative conveys the sense of drift — in part in its very precision. With few wasted words or scenes — even as many of the events she describes and her observations can seem, superficially, to be almost trivial — Nowhere to Be Found is an easily digested short book that nevertheless feels much very substantial — a very full story. ~M.A. Orthofer in The Complete Review

I thought this was excellent. It packs more power into its 100 slim pages than most 300 page plus novels. 배수아 has said: "‘The most suitable way to not say something’—that’s what I think of as the aesthetic of my short fiction."

One of those novels that the second I finished i turned to the start and read again, and doing so was a rewarding experience as one could see appreciate anew the significance of some of the refeences iin the earlier pages.

Sample prose:
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."

I'm glad for the reception this book has gotten. I'm convinced and so will be picking this one up even though it didn't get shortlisted.

Yes, do. I was sceptical such a short book could contain enough to deserve the praise it had, but it was a complete world that felt as substantial as plenty of books 3 times the length.

Agreed - it's excellent (albeit my slight geographic bias). Pity this isn't shortlisted as it could do with the publicity.

I took this for a lunch-time walk yesterday and nearly finished it. I'm hoping to get the same opportunity today.

I'm really enjoying it, and I don't know if I'd have started it but for the good opinion of Paul and Anto above. Hopefully I'll be able to report back soon on how I liked the whole book.