Nowhere to be found - Bae Suah

Wow, this was... Wow

I read this book aloud with a friend over an evening. I feel like this is the way it should be read, even if some passages felt damn near impossible to spit out without choking on the words.

"If you gently stroke my lips and the palm of my hand right now, you will find them strangely cold and icy, a feeling of distance that even I can sense." I started reading at page 37, as my friend's voice was getting hoarse. A few lines later, "Burn me. Pour gasoline over me and set my body on fire. Burn me at the stake like a witch. Wrap me up in garbage bags and throw me in the incinerator. I'll turn into dioxin and make my way into your lungs..." The prose was simple yet strong. It was hard to put down, yet discomforting. And we read on, through the evening, until the book was done, and a silence lay between us.

It was a while before either of us said anything, but the nameless narrator we followed through the pages had taught us a lot, while not telling us much directly about herself at all. We got to know Cheolsu, and his mother. The narrator's sister and brother. But all we had from her was her words, her voice. She is unreliable in that, we have only her words to tell us what happened, and sometimes people's reactions to her actions seem implausible - perhaps she misread the situation? Their dialogue is quite clearly her own remembrance of their words, and I often wondered whether she was putting words in their mouths. I often got the feeling that there was a whole world of activity she barely saw beneath the surface of, or that perhaps she was so overwhelmed she couldn't see it.

The book was bleak, and throughout, I hoped for a Hollywood ending. I wanted redemption and good fortune for the narrator. I wanted her life to get magically better. I wanted so much for her. This feeling grew and grew until Suah broke my heart with the closing lines "And that is how I became an absolutely meaningless thing and survived time."

There is a lot about this book that I probably missed completely due to not knowing enough of Korean culture. I plan to re-read it later this year, paying a more careful eye to the cultural and political things in the book, as I want to understand it more.

I'm not sure that I can critique much of it at the moment - it was a heavier read than the other books so far this year, despite its size. But I'll do my best at a later date.