Untold Night and Day

Author(s): Bae Suah; Deborah Smith (Translator)

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A seductive, disorienting story about parallel lives, unfolding over a day and a night in the sweltering heat of Seoul's summer


For two years, 28-year-old Kim Ayami has worked at Seoul's only audio theatre for the blind. But Ayami has just been made redundant, and thinking about the future feels like staring into the unknown.


Open to anything, Ayami spends a night in the company of her former boss, searching for a mutual friend who has disappeared, and the following day looking after a visiting poet who turns out to be not what he seems. Walking the streets of the city with each man in turn, Ayami talks about art, love and the inaccessible country to the north. But in the sweltering heat of Seoul at the height of the summer, order gives way to chaos and the edges of reality start to fray, with Ayami becoming an unwitting guide to its increasingly tangled threads.


Seductive, disorienting and wholly original, Untold Night and Day asks whether more than one version of ourselves can exist at once - and shows why Bae Suah is considered one of the boldest and most original voices in Korean literature today.

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STELLA'S REVIEW: 
Untold Night and Day is a surreal two-day looped tale. We meet Ayami on her final day of work at the small, only and virtually unknown audio theatre in Seoul. It’s mid-summer and there is a heat-wave. The last visitors to the theatre are a group of high school students who are studying the play, a man who Ayami presumes is their teacher, and a visually impaired girl. The play is The Blind Owl by Iranian author Sadeq Hedayat, a book Ayami is currently reading and discussing with her friend and German teacher, Yeoni. From the first page, Suah creates an unease. Ayami tells the director about the audio that turns itself on sometimes — what she believes is a radio, and the voices remind her of the shipping news in their tone and texture. Ayami has been an actor but, unable to find work, she has been in the menial role at the theatre for two years. Now, she is about to be made redundant and this uncertainty is played out in the heat of a day and a night. As she goes to leave the theatre for the last time she is confronted by a strange occurrence. A man is on the other side of the glass door, seemingly mad, desperately trying to communicate with her. Despite the glass, she feels as though she can hear him. She can lip-read and what she deduces it that he wants revenge, but what for and why is unknown to her.  This stranger seems to know her, but she does not recognise him. The man, Buha, has his own story that runs parallel to Ayami’s, and he is tenuously linked to her by a connection with Yeoni. In his mind, Ayami is a the poet-woman and his obsession with this woman disrupts his perspective. There are further references to poets later — Ayami must meet a foreign poet at the airport, the director goes to a poetry reading, and there is a poet's exhibition held in the now ex-audio theatre. After Buha is taken away by security guards, Ayami goes to meet the director at a ‘blackout’ restaurant where you eat in the dark — your senses of touch and taste enhanced and the waiters are all blind. It is as if the writer wants us to turn off our expectations of what a conventional novel is and tune in other antennae to navigate our way through Untold Night and Day. Here you have the groundwork for the novel — a place where dream and reality are superimposed, where there is a  stretching of time, as well as a concentration of repeated actions. This makes the text both clever and confusing, so much so that I felt at times the puzzle was still to be solved if solving it was the aim. Suah uses a repetitive motif — repeated descriptions of characters, multiple roles, repeated lines, repeated but slightly adjusted actions, objects and images that reoccur (a white bus, a statue with a raised arm (sometimes a man), the book called The Blind Owl, barking dogs) — to superimpose the linked dimensions: all happenings are valid and real, yet surreal and dream-like. The characters are propelled forward by their actions, yet also this throws them into chaos: a chaotic state which is like a fever with its twin traits of clarity and disorientation. Suah’s writing is intriguing and mind-bending — be ready to be taken somewhere else.  


 


THOMAS'S REVIEW:
“Does the weather come before the news or after?” asks a character, or someone, in Bae Suah’s novel Untold Night and Day. That this should be a question, that the familiar should be sufficiently unfamiliar for this question to be asked, not to mention that a reader, for some reason, should find this question worth noting down on a piece of paper, presumably the question appears near the end of the book, perhaps at the point, or at least not before the point, at which the reader decided, assuming that the reader did decide, that they would write what might pass for a review of Untold Night and Day, strikes to the heart, ouch, of Suah’s assault, ouch again, metaphors are bad and lazy, especially these ones, on the problematics of time in the theatre, so to call it, of the quotidian. What justification have we to claim that time ‘flows’, that a moment and all it contains is swept forward, or leaps forward, until it becomes another moment and all that that moment contains? Flows how and in relation to what? Sweeps or leaps forward how and in relation to what? There seems to be, the reader notes, at least the reader who noted down the quote with which this paragraph begins notes, no way of thinking about time without a metaphor, no way of thinking about time without thinking about it in terms of something else, something that it is not. If there is no way of thinking about something except in terms of something that it is not, the reader thinks, we must be thinking wrongly, or lazily, or without sufficient reason to think of it in this way even if our thinking is not completely wrong or lazy. With what could we replace a way of thinking that is either wrong or lazy, the reader wonders, thinking that, immersed as the reader is entirely in language, if that itself is not a metaphor, the reader is not sure, with what could we replace wrong or lazy thinking if not with grammar, the people’s friend? All problems are grammatical problems, it occurs to the reader, all problems, from the problem of time, so to call it, to the problem of the relationship between the mind and the brain, so to call them, can be resolved with grammar, all problems are grammatical problems and can be fixed with a bit of editing. A noun seems certain but is never certain, a noun is arbitrary, contestable, ostensible at best but imprecisely bordered, the reader thinks, a noun may be a useful tool but a noun is never more than a tool, the reader thinks, and, the reader thinks, this especially applies to the so-called proper nouns, a noun is imposed upon reality, so to call it, if there is something that we can call reality, but a noun is never real, not in the way that a verb is real, not in the way that a verb is incontestable, the reader thinks, a verb is never uncertain or ostensible, verbs are really all there is, or all there are, the reader thinks, there are only verbs, everything else we have is just a set of tools to help us think about verbs. The problem of time is a problem with nouns, the reader thinks, all metaphors are illnesses of nouns. Nouns occur, recur, or persist, they perhaps transform or are transformed, instantaneously or slowly, though we are suspicious of this, and rightly so, for change calls all nouns into doubt. Nouns can be replaced or exchanged, though, the reader thinks, without changing much but themselves. There is no great importance to nouns. One of the pleasures of Bae Suah’s Untold Night and Day, and one of the pleasures of Sadegh Hedayat's The Blind Owl, to which Bae Suah frequently refers in her novel, the reader thinks, is the way in which a limited number of elements, a limited number of identities, properties, descriptions and phrases, are combined and recombined to disconcerting effect, blurring the characters and events, each entity reaching for its opposite, or for its undoing, if its opposite and its undoing are not the same thing, each entity sharing the qualities by which we recognise it with some other entity, which thereby is perhaps the same entity since entities are only knots of qualities, arbitrary, ostensible and so forth, we’ve been there, the reader thinks. In Suah’s case we cannot know if the main character is a young actress losing her job at an audio theatre for the blind, or a middle-aged poet and translator of German, like Suah herself, though Suah isn’t a poet, as far as the reader knows, whether there is a temporal relationship between these possibilities, there is evidence both for and against this, one in the eye for the concept of time, whether the legs described as knotty, with too-small feet and shoes well-polished but nevertheless seeming castoff, a description repeated many times but which the reader cannot now find in the book, belong to the actress or the poet or the actress's or the poet’s mother standing outside the closed audio theatre, whether the figure in the white hambok is a blind girl visiting the theatre, or the actress when her other clothes are wet or the actress when she once acted in a film or the poet or someone else, the elements occur and recur, they both attach and detach themselves from entities, they both describe and undermine, they are evidence both for and against any attempt we may make, that we perhaps cannot help making, to resolve character, plot, or any of the other novelistic presumptions we may bring to the book through training or out of habit or convention, we are bad detectives, or, really, inverse detectives, thinks the reader, if there can be such a thing. Wolfi, the German writer who has come to Seoul to finish his detective novel is both absolutely right and absolutely wrong, at least about this book, and certainly simplistic and uninteresting compared with what else could be said, when he says, “the murder is a doppelgänger incident. Readers later realise that the female protagonist is the ghost of the woman who has been murdered many years ago.” Without character or plot, the reader thinks, with neither stasis nor development, with these disconcerting shifts of perspective, entity and tense, there must be some other force that knots the elements, that unknots and reknots them, but what might that be, the reader wonders, if not trauma, trauma unspecified, memory unacknowledged, unfaceable, not present, not mentioned, but pressing upon all that is present and mentioned, memory without the presumption of time. The elements of the book wear themselves out through repetition, the reader thinks, they erase themselves through reiteration. Blindness sucks at the novel, sight is lost, forgetting is a relief, the reader thinks, forgetting is as good as death but without death’s messy aspects, the reader thinks, or the reader thinks that he thinks, he’s not quite sure, at least as far as the novel goes, or forgetting is what makes death unneeded. Everything in Untold Night and Day, this title does not refer to a 24-hour convenience store but the reader wishes he had not thought of a 24-hour convenience store but he cannot stop thinking about it in relation to the title now that he has thought of it, is, as Suah or Suah’s character says, “a symptom of disintegration”, a symptom, why had he not used the word symptom above, in so many places, he wondered, of its own effacement, of the application of combinatorial rigour in the undoing of the effects of memory, in the erasure of unspecified, unspecifiable, trauma, a symptom of the loss of sight. In Untold Night and Day the loss of sight is privileged above all other losses, the reader thinks. All poets are shabby and old, and the oldest and shabbiest and best of the poets is almost blind: “Those milky eyes were the oldest of the body’s constituent parts. Hesitating as though they still did not believe in their own ability to perceive the world, those eyes blinked ceaselessly and irregularly. At each spasmodic movement, the eyeballs themselves aged yet more rapidly.” 


Product Information

General Fields

  • : 9781787331600
  • : Penguin Random House
  • : Jonathan Cape
  • : 0.56699
  • : November 2019
  • : ---length:- '7.812'width:- '5.062'units:- Inches
  • : books

Special Fields

  • : Bae Suah; Deborah Smith (Translator)
  • : Hardback
  • : 2002
  • : English
  • : 895.735
  • : 160