A Greater Music

August 22, 2016
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.”

August 1, 2016

Out on a January walk in Berlin, the unnamed Korean narrator falls into a river. As she struggles to breathe, her experience gives way to both "conventional memories" of what has led her to this icy trap dovetailed with tenuous endeavors to comprehend and explicate a "[g]reater music...a greater universe...a greater distance from the present location." She's returned from Seoul to house- and dog-sit for a sort-of lover, which sparks detailed flashbacks of her last stay in Berlin, when she took unconventional German lessons with a private teacher with whom she became entangled. Bae--herself a notable German-into-Korean translator whose third title-into-English-translation is exquisitely rendered by acclaimed British translator Smith--repeatedly challenges the limitations of language. In content and execution both, this novel is sharp, laconic commentary on dissonant vocabulary, the elusive challenges of mutual understanding, and the too temporary balms provided by music, literature, and even intimacy. VERDICT Bae's intriguing new title (after Time in Gray; Nowhere To Be Found) is another multilayered elegy, sure to find shelf space beside recent internationally lauded Korean imports, including Kyung-sook Shin (Please Look After Mom), Han Kang (The Vegetarian), and Gong Ji-Young (Our Happy Time).--Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon, Washington, DC

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