"Recitation" by Bae Suah

[Betty]

"Recitation asks us to consider whether we might spend less time seeking our own boundaries and more time allowing ourselves to be swept up by the swirl of stories." -- Ramona Ausubel, Korean Literature Now. https://koreanliteraturenow.com/ficti...

[James]

I'm about halfway through Recitation and enjoying it more than her earlier books. This is definitely a meditation on the idea of travel in the modern world, rather than a "travel book" as such; it actually seems quite similar to a book I finished a couple of weeks ago, Flights by Olga Tokarczuk, which also meditates on the idea of wanderers.

[Betty]

James wrote: "I'm about halfway through Recitation and enjoying it more than her earlier books..."

Bae Suah and translator Deborah Smith speak about A Greater Music and Recitation in the link to the Interview in the White Review (below). Wikipedia notes the tendency to depressing outcomes in her fiction. I'm glad that this novel is more enjoyable.

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"Kyung-hee had spied the soft, dark grey body of a nuthatch [...] small enough to be held in one hand [...] Kyung-hee could even make out the orange and gold mix of its round belly, and the long, straight black markings that crossed over its eyes."--2 Are we goshawks


By Rolf Dietrich Brecher from Germany.

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"I think that the myth of the Egyptian goddess Nut, which explains the cycle of the universe through a woman’s body, fits well with this novel."-- Bae Suah in the magazine http://www.thewhitereview.org/feature...
More about Nut https://www.ancient-egypt-online.com/...


By Hans Bernhard (Schnobby), 1976. "Nut, Egyptian goddess of the sky in the tomb of Ramses VI"