arirang's review
2.0
"The future then comes through the wall, a mirror, and it becomes a prophecy of the past."
"거을의 벽을 통해 미래는 과거의 예언이 되였다"
회색 時 / "Time in Gray" by 배수아(Bae Suah) is volume 44 in the Asia Publishers' bilingual series of Modern Korean short stories.
For my general comments on the series see https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1709389820?.
The story has been translated by the husband-and-wife team of 장정화 (Chang Chung-hwa) and Andrew James Keast and comes with an afterword from a literary critic, in this case, 정은경 (Jung Eun-kyoung), although unlike in the more recent K-Fiction series there is no author's afterword.
Bae Suah herself was BTBA longlisted, alongside her translator Sora Kim-Russell 2016 for her excellent Nowhere to be Found (my review), although too little of her other work is available in English, so even if only on these grounds, this book is to be welcomed.
But Time in Gray is a less powerful and satisfying work than Nowhere to be Found, albeit more complex. In English, at least, the prose can be a little dense, although my Korean isn't sufficient to say if this is inherited from the original.
The story falls into two parts; indeed a significant weakness is that Bae Suah needs to spend the first half of the book on an essay explaining the novelistic (at least per the male narrator's view) aesthetic of the story in the second half.
The first half starts:
"Without any specific reason, some very trivial moment from out of the past may appear in one's mind."
The text goes on to explain a theory that such recollection of past events, reflect hints of, and our wishes for, the future. "As time goes by, the scenes of the past become more foreign and more dubious, and those impending events will feel closer and also more approachable ... [the future] has already happened and moved on - it would not even be awkward to employ the past tense."
Indeed as the past becomes increasingly vague - a gray time - "the future then comes through the wall, a mirror, and it becomes a prophecy of the past
And:
"Guilt itself is the universal mirror of the past. Even those happiest moments, moments that might shine in memory, will become things of shame and guilt once they have become a part of the past."
This is part illustrated by the example of a vegetarian friend, racked with guilt at the years he spent before becoming a vegetarian as well as guilt for his membership of the human race, for whom he feels both love but also sees as "a cruel tribe, a tribe who regarded the destruction of life as the highest form of pleasure, destroying life to produce first rate luxury items, symbols of the upper class, items for the gourmand, for athletic leisure, and for collection."
The second half starts:
"More than twenty years ago, for a short period, I was in love with a girl who was four years my senior, and whose name was Sumi."
Despite being "in love with" Sumi, the narrator merely observed her from afar and gossips about her with classmates, but never once actually speaks to her. In the story, he meets her again, many years later (despite having been told that she had died in an accident in the interim). But read according to the aesthetic expressed in the first half, this meeting, told in the past tense, is a possible future event that the narrator imagines to face the shame he feels about how he acted back then.
I'm struggling to do the story justice, but I'm tempted to say the story itself, at least in English translation, struggles to do itself full justice. In that regard, the critical commentary was, in this case, particularly helpful to my understanding.
Overall, Bae Suah is definitely an author who I look forward to reading more, and I believe a novel translated by the Man Booker International winning Deborah Smith is due out in 2017. But this particular story would not be an ideal starting point for those new to her work.
"거을의 벽을 통해 미래는 과거의 예언이 되였다"
회색 時 / "Time in Gray" by 배수아(Bae Suah) is volume 44 in the Asia Publishers' bilingual series of Modern Korean short stories.
For my general comments on the series see https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1709389820?.
The story has been translated by the husband-and-wife team of 장정화 (Chang Chung-hwa) and Andrew James Keast and comes with an afterword from a literary critic, in this case, 정은경 (Jung Eun-kyoung), although unlike in the more recent K-Fiction series there is no author's afterword.
Bae Suah herself was BTBA longlisted, alongside her translator Sora Kim-Russell 2016 for her excellent Nowhere to be Found (my review), although too little of her other work is available in English, so even if only on these grounds, this book is to be welcomed.
But Time in Gray is a less powerful and satisfying work than Nowhere to be Found, albeit more complex. In English, at least, the prose can be a little dense, although my Korean isn't sufficient to say if this is inherited from the original.
The story falls into two parts; indeed a significant weakness is that Bae Suah needs to spend the first half of the book on an essay explaining the novelistic (at least per the male narrator's view) aesthetic of the story in the second half.
The first half starts:
"Without any specific reason, some very trivial moment from out of the past may appear in one's mind."
The text goes on to explain a theory that such recollection of past events, reflect hints of, and our wishes for, the future. "As time goes by, the scenes of the past become more foreign and more dubious, and those impending events will feel closer and also more approachable ... [the future] has already happened and moved on - it would not even be awkward to employ the past tense."
Indeed as the past becomes increasingly vague - a gray time - "the future then comes through the wall, a mirror, and it becomes a prophecy of the past
And:
"Guilt itself is the universal mirror of the past. Even those happiest moments, moments that might shine in memory, will become things of shame and guilt once they have become a part of the past."
This is part illustrated by the example of a vegetarian friend, racked with guilt at the years he spent before becoming a vegetarian as well as guilt for his membership of the human race, for whom he feels both love but also sees as "a cruel tribe, a tribe who regarded the destruction of life as the highest form of pleasure, destroying life to produce first rate luxury items, symbols of the upper class, items for the gourmand, for athletic leisure, and for collection."
The second half starts:
"More than twenty years ago, for a short period, I was in love with a girl who was four years my senior, and whose name was Sumi."
Despite being "in love with" Sumi, the narrator merely observed her from afar and gossips about her with classmates, but never once actually speaks to her. In the story, he meets her again, many years later (despite having been told that she had died in an accident in the interim). But read according to the aesthetic expressed in the first half, this meeting, told in the past tense, is a possible future event that the narrator imagines to face the shame he feels about how he acted back then.
I'm struggling to do the story justice, but I'm tempted to say the story itself, at least in English translation, struggles to do itself full justice. In that regard, the critical commentary was, in this case, particularly helpful to my understanding.
Overall, Bae Suah is definitely an author who I look forward to reading more, and I believe a novel translated by the Man Booker International winning Deborah Smith is due out in 2017. But this particular story would not be an ideal starting point for those new to her work.
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