Untold Night and Day
Ratings15
Average rating3.3
A hypnotic, disorienting story of parallel lives unfolding over a day and a night in the sweltering heat of Seoul's summer For two years, twenty-eight-year-old Kim Ayami has worked at Seoul's only audio theatre for the blind. But now the theatre is shutting down and Ayami's future is uncertain. Her last shift completed and the theatre closed for good, Ayami walks the streets of the city with her former boss late into the night. Together they search for a mutual friend who has disappeared. The following day, at the request of that same friend, Ayami acts as a guide for a detective novelist visiting from abroad. But in the inescapable, all-consuming heat of Seoul at the height of the summer, order gives way to chaos, the edges of reality start to fray, and the past intrudes on the present in increasingly disruptive ways. Blisteringly original, Untold Night and Day is a high-wire feat of storytelling that explores the possibility of worlds beyond the one we see and feel - and shows why Bae Suah is considered one of the boldest voices in Korean literature today.
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Set over a sweltering hot night and day in Seoul, Bae Suah's Untold Night and Day reads like a fever dream. Ayami, a woman in her 30s, works in an audio performance theatre, run by a mysterious foundation. It's her last day, as the theatre is closing and she's been asked by her friend, Yeoni, to meet and look after a visiting poet. She goes for a drink with the director of the theatre but there's a blackout.
Part detective story, part meditation on identity, this short novel is a tangled web of misdirection, repetition and dreams within dreams. The same scenes are told from different character's viewpoints, but even then there are differences in what happened and to whom. Has Yoeni disappeared or is she in hospital? Who is Ayami really? Who is the director? Is the poet really a poet or a writer of pulp detective fiction? Suah weaves these (false?) narratives together into something approaching a cohesive whole.....but every reader will have a different interpretation of what the story is about.
At times surreal, at times disturbing Untold Night and Day is a novel that makes you think and it does stay with you. It would repay rereading I think. Strange and unsettling.
