Home For Fiction – Blog

I’ve been meaning to write this review of Untold Night and Day by the Korean author Bae Suah a long, long time. Until now I hesitated, the reason being I didn’t feel it’s the kind of book that can be easily described (let alone reviewed) with words. I felt I needed something else – literally another work of art; keep reading! – to properly express what a masterpiece this short novel is.

You see, Untold Night and Day is so out of the ordinary that it utterly defies traditional categories of literary criticism. Genre? Plot? Characters? These concepts break down when dealing with such a masterpiece, such an authentic writers’ book.

I’ll try anyway. Just as a sign of respect toward Bae Suah, who gave the world such a stunning piece of art.

Suffice to say, I’ve read it five times already in less than three years and will surely repeat it again. It’s the kind of book that actually demands such a thing.

Untold Night and Day: The What

Based on my usual review post structure, here you would expect a heading referring to the novel’s genre and plot, followed by a word on characters.

It’s pointless for me to even attempt such a narrowly defined typification.

On some level, Untold Night and Day is an example of experimental fiction; and yet it isn’t. It’s also certainly flirting with literary fiction – displaying rich inner worlds, intricate symbolism, and powerful stylistic literary devices; and yet, not quite.

Untold Night and Day is just itself, and there’s no other way of describing it.

On the surface, the novel follows “some time” in the life of a young actress who has just lost her menial, secretarial job at an insignificant theater. Whether “some time” refers to “a night and a day” or something else – or where reality stops and something else begins – is left to the reader.

Blurbs and short summaries of the book, such as the one on Goodreads, often use terms like “disorienting”, “dreamlike”, “hallucinating”, and other terms that probably repel morons from it. Good! They should stay the fuck away from this literary diamond, because they won’t understand it anyway.

Untold Night and Day: The How

Bae Suah, as a literary translator, intimately knows the power of words and language. As a result, her style (also props to Deborah Smith, the translator) creatively and skillfully helps this power manifest.

It’s very difficult for me to properly describe how Suah’s style operates without taking something away from your reading experience – it’s one of those literary things you need to discover on your own – but I’ll say this: Words themselves, the way they are used, re-used, and modified throughout the course of the narrative, support its affective elements.

All too often we see writers playing with style and form without fully understanding why. To be a bit blunt: I sort-of-like Cormac McCarthy style (well, at least I don’t quite dislike it), but his obstinate snubbing of punctuation was at least partly justified by his narratives. Those imitating him blindly, more often than not, don’t have a narrative that can be supported by it. It becomes, then, a writing gimmick.

Bae Suah, in Untold Night and Day, creates a dreamlike, hallucinatory, ambiguous literary landscape where words are more powerful than they seem, “the plot” is a necessary evil, symbolism is intricate (and thus more rewarding), and the reader must really put in the work to participate in the experience.

Sleeping in the City of Abandoned Dreams: A Homage to Bae Suah’s Masterpiece

Right above I described Untold Night and Day as “dreamlike, hallucinatory, ambiguous”. If that rings a bell, you read something similar in my last post, on my recent short novel Sleeping in the City of Abandoned Dreams, “[which] is dreamlike, hallucinatory, elliptical, avoids explanations, at times [being] almost (but not) a collection of scenes”.

The reason I like love Untold Night and Day so much is because it encapsulates everything I find meaningful in literature: Deep introspection, intricate symbolism, ambiguity, open-endedness, and complete and utter disregard for intricate plots, fitting in existing molds, and we-have-always-done-things-this-way’s.

This approach is something I’ve long tried to achieve with my works too, and Sleeping in the City of Abandoned Dreams ended up being a homage of sorts to Bae Suah’s, since it captured so efficiently the overall aura of the elements above.

As I told my friend Igor sometime ago, if I had to send one and only one book to an alien race to express what literature means to me, it’d be Bae Suah’s Untold Night and Day.