On a black, hot night in Seoul…

This surreal novel, filled with images of hamburgers and pockmarked women, feels like a dream, finds Luiza Sauma

The Daily Telegraph Saturday 7 March 2020

feathers; shrunken human heads; a series of abandoned McDonald’s Happy Meal toys; and the gilded skull of Pablo Escobar’s hippo (pictured). Wynd’s new book, with glossy pictures and polished, amusing text, makes an idiosyncratic guide to the museum and, through it, to himself: “I have removed my mind, bashed it flat with a sledgehammer and then picked out bits that sparkled, caught my eye and I felt like sharing with you.” Prestel, £35

OUNTOLD NIGHT AND DAY by Bae Suah, tr Deborah Smith 160pp, Jonathan Cape, £12.99, ebook £7.99

n a sweltering day in Seoul, the former actress Kim Ayami works her final shift at an audio theatre for the blind. She wonders what she will do next, “with unemployment staring her in the face and not much time left before her 28th birthday”. Bae Suah’s Untold Night and Day is not a simple tale of quarter-life crisis, however, but a surreal, disorientating and highly original novel, full of unsolved mysteries, repeated motifs and startling prose.

Bae, who splits her time between living in Seoul and

Berlin, is a prolific novelist and short story writer. She has translated Franz Kafka and W G Sebald from German to Korean, which gives some indication of the dreamlike circularity of her own writing. Untold Night and Day, her first book released by a major British publisher, makes her the latest in a wave of South Korean artists being embraced by the

West – from fellow novelists Han Kang and Cho Nam-joo to the Oscar-winning director Bong Joon-ho.

If they have anything in common, it’s that their work feels remarkably fresh to anyone accustomed to European and New World aesthetics. Bae’s novel is almost impossible to describe, though Deborah Smith comes close in her elegant Translator’s Note: “simultaneously a detective novel

The city in a heatwave ‘is like an animal being smothered by a heap of steaming earth’

“contrary to life”. It seems “almost perverse”, Shapiro notes, for so sensitive a polity to have made such a writer “essential to their classrooms and theatres”. The results of their doing so make for