A Greater Music
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
From the author nominated for the Best Translated Book Award and the PEN Translation Prize
"Bae Suah offers the chance to unknow—to see the everyday afresh and be defamiliarized with what we believe we know—which is no small offering."—Sophie Hughes, Music & Literature
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 housesitting 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 a woman called M, an ultra-refined music-loving German teacher who was once her lover.
A novel of memories and wandering, A Greater Music blends riffs on music, language, and literature with a gut-punch of an emotional ending, establishing Bae Suah as one of the most exciting novelists working today.
Bae Suah, one of the most highly acclaimed contemporary Korean authors, has published more than a dozen works and won several prestigious awards. She has also translated several books from the German, including works by W. G. Sebald, Franz Kafka, and Jenny Erpenbeck. Her first book to appear in English, Nowhere to be Found, was longlisted for a PEN Translation Prize.
Deborah Smith's literary translations from the Korean include two novels by Han Kang (The Vegetarian and Human Acts), and two by Bae Suah, (A Greater Music and Recitation).
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After a three-year absence, an unnamed writer returns to Berlin in this dulcet, contemplative novel from the author of Nowhere to Be Found. The visit becomes a "continuation of a dream" for the narrator, one that began when she was first being tutored in German by M, a sickly woman with "eyes like a winter lake with an iceberg at its heart" whose twin loves of literature and classical music matched the narrator's own. Their relationship swiftly turned to romance, and instilled in the narrator "the desire to write, the blazing desire to set down sentences that were true, sincere, and not the stuff of children." After a fit of jealousy sent the narrator spiraling into a "swamp of shame," she abandoned M for Seoul. At home, the screening of a banal film makes her realize she's made a terrible mistake. A far cry from that "unbearable celebration of the conventional," this novel stutters through its recollection of events, digressing regularly to ruminate on figures like the composer Bernd Alois Zimmerman or the German writer Jacob Hein. The structure bedevils as much as it illuminates, but ultimately, this book serves as an articulate and moving reflection of how life can stop "for a time in a certain fluid place between past and future."
