The first will take place in the Humanities Center at Rush Rhees Library on the Ģą˝´«Ă˝’s campus from 12:30-2pm. Perfect for any students, faculty, etc., who are on campus and want a little lunchtime brain stimulation!

The second will take place at (Village Gate, 302 N. Goodman) from 6-7:30pm. A very bookish bar and restaurant, Nox is one of our favorite places to host events. Great space, great staff, great food, and great cocktails.

In terms of the events themselves, at both, Bae will be read a bit from all four of her translated books and will answer a series of questions about her craft and influences. I’ve already scripted the questions, so I can say with certainty that she’ll talk a bit about how she got her start—and the Korean literary scene in general—the impact of German literature (she’s translated Kafka, Sebald, Erpenbeck, and others into Korean) on her style and literary approach, the way she creates a landscape of consciousness in her books, and much more.

One of South Korea’s most highly acclaimed writers, Bae Suah is the author of five novels and more than ten short story collections, and has received both the Hanguk Ilbo and Tongseo literary prizes. Nowhere to Be Found, translated by Sora Kim-Russell, was longlisted for the PEN Translation Prize and the Best Translated Book Award. Translations of her works have been widely praised for their beauty and precision, with Sophie Hughes summing it up wonderfully for Music & Literature:

The experience of reading the prize-winning Korean-born writer Bae Suah is simultaneously uncanny, estranting, and spellbinding, an effect that becomes perceptible the more you read . . . Bae Suah offers the chance to unknow—to see the every-day afresh and be defamiliarized with what we believe we know—which is no small offering.

So, if you’re in Rochester, you should definitely come out to one or both of these, and even if you’re not here, you should check out one of her books. Here’s the full info on the three that are already available:

(Translated by Deborah Smith)

The meeting between a group of emigrants and a mysterious, wandering actress in an empty train station sets the stage for Bae Suah’s fragmentary yet lyrical meditation on language, travel, and memory. As the actress recounts the fascinating story of her stateless existence, an unreliable narrator and the interruptions of her audience challenge traditional notions of storytelling and identity.

(Translated by Deborah Smith)

Near the beginning of A Greater Music, the narrator, a young Korean writer, falls into an icy river in the Berlin suburbs, where she’s been house-sitting for her on-off boyfriend Joachim. This sets into motion a series of memories that move between the hazily defined present and the period three years ago when she first lived in Berlin. Throughout, the narrator’s relationship with Joachim, a rough-and-ready metalworker, is contrasted with her friendship with M, an ultra-refined music-loving German teacher who was once her lover.

(Translated by Sora Kim-Russell)

A nameless narrator passes through her life, searching for meaning and connection in experiences she barely feels. For her, time and identity blur, and all action is reaction. She can’t quite understand what motivates others to take life seriously enough to focus on anything—for her existence is a loosely woven tapestry of fleeting concepts. From losing her virginity to mindless jobs and a splintered, unsupportive family, the lessons learned have less to do with the reality we all share and more to do with the truth of the imagination, which is where the narrator focuses to discover herself.

by Bae Suah, translated from the Korean by Sora Kim-Russell (South Korea, AmazonCrossing)

Anyone with more than a fleeting interest in literature in translation will be aware of the lack of women published in English, but Korea seems to be a country that could buck this trend. Despite the passing of the grande dame of K-Lit, Park Wan-suh, and the aging of other major writers of that generation (O Chong-hui, Ch’oe Yun), there are several female writers ready to make a splash in the West. Over in the UK, Han Kang is the one who has made the biggest waves so far, but across the Atlantic it is Bae Suah who might become the new face of K-Lit, particularly if she takes out the Best Translated Book Award this year. It certainly wouldn’t be undeserved.

Nowhere to be Found is one of two Bae Suah novellas released by AmazonCrossing (both translated by Sora Kim Russell), and what it lacks in size, running to only around sixty pages in print form, it makes up for in quality and emotive writing. Bae’s narrator is a young woman in her mid-twenties, stuck in the lower rings of what young Koreans call “Hell Choseon,” a country where those who fail to excel at school are destined for a life of crappy, badly-paid jobs (and those who do can look forward to working 100-hour weeks while being screamed at by their boss for the next fifty years). Although the story was originally published over twenty years ago, I suspect little has changed since the story first appeared in Korean, and anyone in a country where the working classes are exploited will be able to empathize with the characters (which, I guess, would be just about all of us . . . ).

With the nameless narrator finding herself as the main breadwinner for her family, for reasons that only become clear towards the end of the book, she is forced to work almost around the clock. Friends and family assume that she will marry her high-school friend Cheolsu, an average guy in the middle of his mandatory military service, yet she is not the kind of woman to simply give in to keep everyone else happy, even if getting married to a spoiled mummy’s boy will make her life a little easier. Just as is the case in the earlier novella, Highway with Green Apples, Bae’s character is a strong woman in a society geared towards serving men’s needs, perfectly willing and able to stand up for herself when necessary (and when she says she doesn’t like chicken, just go with it . . . ).

What lifts Nowhere to Be Found above Highway with Green Apples (and many of the BTBA longlist titles), though, is the way the writer spends half the story creating a tone before suddenly shattering it in a few brief paragraphs, the casual account of a humdrum daily life giving way to a frenzied moment of passion and self-harm. This pivotal moment half-way through the story turns the action on its head, preparing us for the second part of the book, which we now suspect might not be as calm as we were expecting. In fact, it becomes ever more confused. After a bizarre visit to Cheolsu’s army camp, in the course of which she begins to lose touch with reality, the narrator’s life drifts slowly along until we return to the scene we glimpsed at the heart of the work, which this time is even more disturbing . . .

Of course, none of this would work unless it were well-written, and Bae, even at this early stage of her career, manipulates the story masterfully. She excels in sudden shifts of pace, deliberate attempts to unsettle the reader, and you often find yourself being dragged from the middle of one anecdote into another, as if the narrator had just remembered something and needed to get it off her chest before continuing with her tale. Whether it is random asides about subway stations full of people she used to know (and others she will meet in the future), or stories about her brother’s past relationships, everything she comes up with is interesting and also somehow linked to the bigger picture, providing another detail which may, or may not, help us to understand what her story is all about.

For those who enjoy it (and I suspect many will), Nowhere to Be Found is a frustratingly brief glimpse of the abilities of an excellent writer, but never fear—help is at hand. Two longer titles will be released later this year, Recitation from Deep Vellum and A Greater Music from Open Letter (with the latter publishing another title in 2017), news that will gladden the hearts of those who are desperate for more of Bae’s work. It appears that the future of literature in translation may well lie with writers like Bae Suah and her countrywomen, and I, for one, welcome our new female Korean overlords (or should that be overladies . . . ).

On the first podcast of the year, Tom and I talked about our reading goals for 2015. I can’t remember the exact number or percentage, but I vowed to read more books from these sorts of underrepresented countries, since I tend to fall into the habit of reading a ton of writers from France and the Southern Cone, despite knowing full well that there are a lot of great books coming out from other parts of the world.

So, for today, here are four recommendations of titles from countries whose literature tends not to get as much attention as books from Western Europe and South America.

by Bae Suah, translated from the Korean by Sora Kim-Russell (AmazonCrossing)

One of the best books AmazonCrossing has ever published. (Well, out of the handful I’ve read, that is . . . ) Despite Dalkey Archive’s Korean books still don’t get the attention and respect they deserve.

It’s too early to really call this, but it looks like Bae Suah is going to be the exception to that. Sure, Kyung-Sook Shin got some good press for Please Look After Mom, but I’m not sure how well that sold, and her ensuing titles didn’t get nearly that amount of attention. (Doesn’t help that she went from being published by Knopf to being published by Other Press.)

On the other hand, Nowhere to Be Found was just named to the longlist for the PEN Translation Prize and Open Letter will be bringing out a new novel of hers next October. I wrote a about this book, which opens as follows:

In Nowhere to Be Found, her second work translated into English following Highway with Green Apples, Bae Suah does more with character and narrative in 60 pages than most novelists accomplish in 300. With concise, evocative prose, Bae merges the mundane with the strange in a way that leaves the reader fulfilled yet bewildered, pondering how exactly the author managed to pull this all off.

Plot-wise, Nowhere to Be Found is pretty straightforward. Set, for the most part, in 1988, the unnamed narrator is a young temporary worker at a university in Gyeonggi Province as a sort of administrative assistant and works part-time at a nearby restaurant, running herself ragged in order to support her semi-appreciative family. Not much of the narrator’s life outside of work is depicted. Although she does have a boyfriend of sorts, it’s complicated both by his being away in the military and by the fact that his mother thoroughly dislikes her for being lower class.

This book is great, as is the one we’re bringing out. Get on the Bae Suah train now! And if you’re looking for other great Korean titles to read, grab a copy of The Vegetarian by Han Kang when it comes out in early 2016.

by Leila Chudori, translated from the Indonesian by John McGlynn (Deep Vellum)

I could easily have included one of the two Eka Kurniawan titles that came out this year on this list as an Indonesian representative, but those books have gotten some play, and I wanted to use this chance to draw some attention to John McGlynn.

First, in terms of the book itself, it’s a family saga that revolves around Dimas Suryo, a journalist who escapes Indonesia just before Suharto took over. He ends up in Paris with a few of his compatriots, where they open and Indonesia restaurant and dream of returning to their homeland. (Which won’t happen.) Thirty years later, as Suharto’s regime is crumbling, Dimas’s daughter decides to make a documentary on Indonesia for her final project . . .

Written in straight-forward prose, Home is mostly interesting to me for its historical information and the way that it bounces throughout time and point of view to tell this history of exile. It would make a great book club book, and unfortunately was overshadowed, in terms of review coverage, by Eka Kurniawan’s Beauty Is a Wound and Man Tiger, which happened to come out at almost the exact same time. (Doesn’t help that Beauty covers the same period of history, but in a much different way.)

With one exception (Rainbow Troops by Andrea Hirata), the only other Indonesian titles that have been released in the U.S. are from the a nonprofit in Jakarta dedicated to promoting Indonesian literature, which was co-founded by John McGlynn, the translator Home. From what I know of John, he’s the Will Evans of Indonesia. He’s translated and edited over 100 works of Indonesian literature, is the Indonesian correspondent for Manoa, and has edited a special Indonesian Lit issue for Words Without Borders. Almost single-handedly, he’s been introducing Indonesian literature to the world since 1987!

by Boubacar Boris Diop, translated from the French (Senegal) by Alan Furness (Michigan State University Press)

A full review of this is forthcoming for Three Percent, so I won’t spend too much time on the book itself here. I do want to share the opening of Michael Orthofer’s review at the though, especially since it was one of the only outlets to have covered this book. (Proving once again that if you want to know as much about international literature as possible, you have to read Complete Review and the Literary Saloon.):

As befits a novel featuring a knight in its title, The Knight and His Shadow is fundamentally a quest-tale: Lat-SukabĂ© receives a message from the woman he still loves but who disappeared from his life eight years earlier, Khadidja—a cry for help: “Lat-SukabĂ©, come before it’s too late.” He sets out for out-of-the-way Bilenty, where she is apparently to be found, but his account is from his time in the nearby town where he has to arrange the pirogue-trip to Bilenty.

The novel is presented in three acts, covering the three days of his stay there, a holding pattern of sorts. Having embarked on his quest, he must see if he really has the will to see it through—a journey that, he comes to realize, might be something completely different from what he had expected (or talked himself into), Khadidja’s siren-call not quite what it seems to be and his quest perhaps a more personal one than it ostensibly seems.

Diop structures the novel cleverly. Having Lat-SukabĂ© narrate the account might already hint that this is also a story of personal (self-) discovery, but the transitions lead the reader—and the protagonist—there in an unexpected way.

What most impresses me is how MSU Press has decided to publish a series of translations from Africa and the Middle East. They published books from Senegal, Jordan, and Tanganyika in 2015, and have an Algerian book coming out early next year. Although getting attention and readers for these books is an uphill battle for a university press (for anyone really), they can quickly become one of the go-to presses for finding books from these parts of the world—regions that more commercial houses tend not to pay much attention to, but which we readers deserve to know more about.

by Oleg Woolf, translated from the Russian (Moldova) by Boris Dralyuk (Phoneme Media)

I’m including this here in part because its been compared to Bruno Schulz, in part because it’s only the second book from Moldova to come out in the past eight years (The Good Life Elsewhere by Vladimir Lorchenkov, translated by the amazing Ross Ufberg being the other), and in part because Phoneme Media deserves as much attention as possible.

First, here’s the first paragraph of the book itself:

One day a freight arrived from Grigoriopol with no head car, but no one noticed. No one even noticed that no one noticed. People often pay no heed, at times, to things they later don’t notice. No one, in fact, knows where this head car is—whether it arrived from Grigoriopol, whether it will arrive, whether there’s even a railroad in those parts.

(This story also includes a Gypsy, which gets an automatic thumbs up from me.)

In the short time they’ve been publishing, Phoneme Media has done some incredible things. They published Diorama by Rocio Ceron, which won the 2015 Best Translated Book Award for Poetry. They did Like a New Sun: New Indigenous Mexican Poetry, which may be the only collection of indigenous Mexican poetry I’ve ever seen. (And which may well make my “Poetry Books I Would Read if I Read More Poetry” list.) The did The Black Flower and Other Zapotec Poems by Natalia Toledo. They brought out Uyghurland by Ahmatjan Osman, which is the only book in the Translation Database translated from the Uyghur. They’ve published several books by Mario Bellatin. Overall, thanks to David Shook’s vision, they’ve become one of the hippest, most notable presses for finding strange, beautiful books from languages and parts of the world that are underrepresented.

I’m pretty sure that over the next few years—with the launch of Tilted Axis, expansion of MSU and Phoneme and others—it will become easier and easier for readers to find books from parts of the world that have historically been underrepresented. To be honest, looking over the list of books from 2015, I was kind of shocked how hard it was to find books from non-traditional countries. Sure, there are four titles from Georgia and seven from Egypt, but only one from: Angola, Cameroon, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Curacao, India, Pakistan, Mozambique, Senegal, and Tunisia. Added together, these countries accounted for 20 titles published in translation in 2015. By contrast, 94 came out from France along.

This match was judged by Mythili Rao, producer for at WNYC.

For more information on the Women’s World Cup of Literature, click here or here. Also, be sure to follow our and like our And check back here daily!

What a brutal match. These two novels hold nothing back. Read in succession, it’s hard to take in their fight for narrative supremacy without flinching. These are books about the hard truths of life we don’t wish to discover—but are nonetheless powerless to shield ourselves from.

**

First: South Korea’s effort. It’s easy to underestimate Bae Suah’s Nowhere to Be Found. It’s a slight volume—roughly as tall and wide as my outstretched hand and only 103 pages long. But the anguish and desperation of those pages lingered in my mind long after I finished reading. The novel follows an unnamed young woman who, when the story opens in 1988, is employed as a temp worker in a dead-end clerical position at the university. Despite her college credentials, it’s the best job she can get. It’s better than her second job, serving food, mopping floors, and washing dishes at a restaurant behind the Plaza Hotel; and it’s much better than the factory job she works screwing caps of dye onto tubes during the university’s summer break. In any case, father has been imprisoned and her mother drinks too much to hold a job, so the important thing is simply that she work. And work.

While her serious older brother scrimps and saves to make the journey to Japan (where he plans to work for a janitorial service cleaning sewers) and her bright little sister daydreams of completely reinventing herself as a lesbian, Nowhere’s narrator drifts from job to job in a state of exhaustion. Between shifts, she goes to see her boyfriend Cheolsu. His flat aspect perfectly complements her own numbness:

He just looked blank sometimes. While everyone else was tormented by a restless anxiety, like the dizziness you feel on a spring day, which made them question what they were doing with their lives, Cheolsu was yawning and working on a crossword puzzle. He knew how to accept the tedium without the ennui.

The dramatic heart of this book is built around an unforgivably frigid winter day when the narrator goes to visit Cheolsu on the army base where he’s completing service. After riding bus to the subway and then another subway to another bus, she’s told Cheolsu has left the base for training exercise. So she heads back out into the cold on another bus, carrying a bag of chicken Cheolsu’s nosy mother has entrusted her to deliver to her son. He’s not there. When she at last finds Cheolsu—back in at the headquarters she first visited—he can’t understand why she’s so delayed. The visit ends disastrously.

The narration fast-forwards a decade from there. There’s a parade of other jobs, and a smattering of new coworkers, acquaintances, and would-be lovers—but it’s as though everything began and ended in 1988. The narrator’s feeling of dislocation and hopelessness persists and softly, steadily, deepens through the book’s haunting close. In Sora Kim-Russell’s translation, Suah’s prose is cold and acrid. “Time pushes away that which is intended, rejects that which is rejected, forgets that which is sung about, and is filled with that which it turns its eyes from, such as the white hairs of a loved one,” the narrator concludes. When I emerged from the subway after reading Nowhere’s final page, it was a 70 degree June day but an icy chill ran through my heart.

**

Enter Spain. The Happy City takes a no less deadly but measurably more complex approach. Elvira Navarro’s novel, set in Madrid, is divided into two parts. The first opens, similarly, with a young man trapped by economic circumstances beyond his control. Chi-Huei spends his early days with his aunt in China; when as an elementary-schooler he’s finally reunited with his immediate family in Spain, he’s suspicious of these strangers. As he grows, his feelings toward his family only become complicated. His mother and grandfather run a restaurant that’s supposed to ensure their future; broken by his time in a Chinese prison, Chi-Huei’s father does his best to simply comply with his headstrong wife and father’s wishes. For his part, Chi-Huei is trapped by the weight of familial duty. After Navarro describes the intimate contours of a recurring argument between Chi-Heui and his mother, she leaves the young protagonist with a bleak discovery:

Every day of his life since had arrived had been a hymn to work, to money, to efficiency—a hymn he had to sing through his excellent grades at school and his help in the kitchen and the aspirations he was required to have for the future. And all as thanks for what they earned him in good faith and with all their love, believing that this and this alone was their duty, the restaurant-rotisserie in which they all worked for aspirations that were not his own and that, to his utter disgust, were quite the opposite, though he wasn’t able to specify what this opposite was.

The second part of The Happy City follows one of Chi-Huei’s neighborhood friends, a precocious, secretive girl named Sara who becomes fascinated by a homeless man she encounters on the street. They have something powerful in common: Her imagination, like his, rejects boundaries. Sara’s parents grow alarmed when the learn of her fascination with this vagrant, but when they ground her, she only grows more obsessed. Nothing in her world is more interesting than this man who lives on the edges of society. Sara and the homeless man begin wordlessly stalking each other; eventually, they strike up a friendship.

It’s a chaste relationship, but a thoroughly corrupting one, all the same. Sara’s interest in the homeless man leaves her no time for girlish pursuits. She ignores art classes and is bored by her friends. In The Happy City’s final scene—a confrontation between Sara’s parents and the homeless man in the bar where she has been sneaking afternoon visits over potato chips with him—Navarro again demonstrates an uncanny talent for depicting the layers of tension that build up in family life. As Sara’s parents enter the bar, “They walk with the full weight of duty upon them, staring hard at the ground, and I suppose they know that I look at them, and that I am terrified.” As Sara’s father addresses the object of his daughter’s fascination, she becomes the conversation’s translator—and in doing so, learns something about her own limits.

**

In the end, The Happy City is the winner of this match, 3-2: Nowhere to Be Found’s best efforts simply couldn’t match the combined power of Chi-Huei and Sara’s forceful and sharply aimed narratives. After two beautiful, hard-earned goals per team, in stoppage time, Spain comes through with one more taste of net to win the game.

Next up, Spain’s The Happy City will face off against Costa Rica’s Assault on Paradise on Friday, June 26th.

Tomorrow’s match will be judged by Emily Ballaine, and features Germany’s The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine by Alina Bronsky up against Thailand’s The Happiness of Kati by Ngarmpun (Jane) Vejjajiva.