Synesthesia in Action

This passage is one of the clearest depictions of synesthesia I’ve read in a novel in a long time. It’s from Lemon, by the South Korean writer Kwon Yeo-sun. The book tells the story of a young girl’s mysterious death — more to the point, the stories of her death, numerous ones described from different points of view at distant stages of the extended, dire denouement of her passing. In this moment — and the less said regarding this narrator the better — a character is approaching a psychic break. The impact of that early sentence, “Obiects watched me constantly,” is too unhinged to merely be paranoia. By the time the character gets around to the brutality of overheard sound, all bets are off. What makes this scene work isn’t merely the way it shifts from sound to synchronous sight (“I saw them with my eyes”), but how much of a jumble follows. It isn’t merely a one-to-one mapping of sound and vision, but a whole mashup of physical experiences. It’s one of the most visceral moments in the book, and it’s all an interior monologue.

When in doubt as to what to read, I sometimes just pick something from Steven Soderbergh’s end-of-year reading lists, which is how I came upon this book (and why I also recently read Kirstin Chen’s Counterfeit). I steer clear, generally, of stories that begin with a kid dying (which seems to be about 80% of television and 20% of popular fiction), but somehow this one slipped past my filters and I’m glad it did.