Untold Day and Night by Bae Suah
Review of Untold Day and Night by Bae Suah, translated by Deborah Smith
“The body is a passageway - a channel, without which the two of us would not be able to exist in the way we do now, the way I know you and you know me. Without their mirror images, our original forms would not exist.”
Untold Night and Day by Bae Suah and translated by Deborah Smith (2020). Published in English by The Overlook Press
I’ve always meant to read one of Bae Suah’s works. When I was initially discovering which Korean authors I wanted to read, the name Bae Suah came up over and over again. I wanted to focus on Korean women’s literature, but defining women as being written by a woman. This stemmed from my interest in the work of Kim Hye-soon, who is considered a feminist poetry icon in Korea, but this came with quite a price throughout her career, especially as she started in a time where poetry was a boy’s club.
Bae Suah is one of the most well-known fiction female fiction authors. She has won so many awards for her work and she has been widely translated due to her fame as a writer. While I’ve read a lot of Korean literature, this is the first thing I’ve read by Bae Suah. Was the writing good and at a high-level? Yes, it was dynamic despite the fact it was translated, and I’ve heard that Deborah Smith has been quite the translator when it comes to getting Korean literature to the English-speaking world.
Woo! I feel like I’ve typed a lot already, so let’s dive into this review.
Content
While the story is very streamlined and simple in this novel, it’s like a hammer philosophically. This tends to be the case in a lot of Korean literature I read, as they’ve all been jam-packed with symbolism and themes that make you think about society. Such is the case in Untold Day and Night, where we meet Ayami. She is twenty-seven years old, seemingly unskilled, single, and the audio theatre that she’s working at is closing down permanently. The entire novel takes place in one day and one night (so one full day if you think about it, since it’s the daytime and then the night). First is Ayami’s last day at the audio theatre, and then she goes to visit her German tutor who has mysteriously disappeared. She then goes to the airport to pick up a German poet, who she promised she would be the interpreter for, where we discover this guy has accidentally come to Korea.
There’s so much repetition packed in this little novel. The most blatant one to me was the symbol of The Blind Owl by the Iranian author Sadegh Hadeyat, which is something I actually wrote about in my undergraduate thesis about Iranian women and depictions of them in literature and film. My main argument was that in The Blind Owl, women are objectified to the point where they are either condemned to the shadows or are an ethereal beauty, one that is worshipped by the men around them. I found this absolutely fascinating to be included by Bae Suah because I had made an argument about how The Blind Owl actually perpetuates the male gaze in Iranian literature.
We also have the repetition of poets and artists interwoven into the narrative. Our main character is questionably an actress or a poet—we randomly have a split in the narrative where we switch narrators and he keeps referring to Ayami as the poet woman, but we very clearly get a scene right before this in which Ayami very explicitly is described as not a poet. It’s confusing. Her former boss, as they going eating together in this strange restaurant where it’s completely blacked out, goes into a rant about this event he went to with a bunch of poets. A German poet must be picked up outside the airport.
There’s also this radio that keeps switching on and off for no reason. Shadows seem to persist everywhere as a heat wave ravages Seoul, while our main character is now unemployed. You’d think that this story would be simple, how it only clocks in at 150 pages of work, because Ayami has just been fired and we only have a day to fit in the story. There’s some points in the novel where I found myself questioning if this was a dream sequence or if something was actually happening. We have a man screaming at her in a suit with bloodshot eyes, but then we also have a random image and character of a girl in a stiff cotton hanbok appearing two or three times in the text. There were quite a few moments in which I sat this book down and had to think about what exactly I was reading and what it meant.
The actual writing in this novel is stunning, despite it being very confusing and experimental when it comes to the actual structuring. I felt like I was right there with the characters, that I could visualize what was going on, and I wasn’t bored with the pacing and stylistic elements that Bae had sprinkled throughout the book. Although, I will say, I was a bit bored with the main character. I think we didn’t get enough time with her and so her personality comes across as a bit bland on the page.
Overall Thoughts
Some people may be able to understand this novel, but, to be honest, I was quite confused. This is a very surrealist novel, and if you’re simply not used to that kind of writing, you’re also going to end up very confused. Our characters hash out these long dialogues and conversations about art, poetry, and performance, but we don’t actually see any of that in the novel itself. We don’t have enough time with our narrator to truly connect with her, nor with anyone that’s introduced in the novel. The majority of the novel is actually dialogue, which I didn’t realize until now. While I enjoyed the writing itself and pacing, this story wasn’t just for me.
