Bae Su-Ah - one of the most risk-taking, experimental writers active in Korea today. The name of the city was ‘secret.’ It was a city where all the windows were dark, all the windows were silent, all the windows were opaque, and all the windows were lost in introspection

Bae Suah, Nowhere to Be Found, Trans. by Sora Kim-Russell. AmazonCrossing, 2015.

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.

The experience of reading the prize-winning Korean-born writer Bae Suah is simultaneously uncanny, estranging, and spellbinding, an effect that becomes perceptible the more you read. “A little kid in dirty clothes was sitting in the street in front of a house, crying with his mouth wide open,” one particularly apposite passage begins. “After the bus had taken several turns and gone over a hill, I saw the same little boy in front of the same house, still crying. Was it really the same kid? I looked around and tried to jog my memory. Identical vacant houses, fields, paddies, sheds, and bus stops slid past. How long had I been on the bus?” These words perhaps give a taste of Bae’s penchant for reiteration, but they do not, cannot show quite how sophisticated her employment of repetition is—ideas and images woven throughout the lengths of these plot-light but carefully constructed stories—or how it gives rise to such an intense reading experience. Sophisticated because, wittingly or not, Bae has performed the seemingly impossible, or at least oxymoronic: she defamiliarizes words and images by repeating words and images. Repetition, on the whole, creates a sense of familiarization, not defamiliarization. While the idea that the same words never carry the same weight or meaning twice is not a new one (Gertrude Stein’s ideas on insistence, or Heraclitus’ river theory work along the same lines) Bae exploits it in her fiction to tremendous effect: delighting in the possibility of words having infinite meanings and effects, in these short, spiraling narratives—Nowhere to Be Found and her earlier story, also published by Amazon, Highway with Green Apples—Bae sends her readers around and around the same words and ideas, lifting us to new proximities to them, and to mesmeric landscapes, both geographical (in Korea) and psychological (in her narrators). These voices and set scenes, in particular with the more assured Nowhere to Be Found, resonated with such hyper-real clarity I felt I might have dreamed rather than read them: How long had I been in this book?
Bae’s young, weary speakers are watchers, and their recurring observations are central to Bae’s storytelling. Partly, it is how Bae achieves what the Russian formalist Victor Shklovsky called “art’s function”: “to help us recover the sensation of life; […] to make us feel things, to make the stone stony.” We might be given to believe from their spiritless tones that Bae’s narrators have succumbed to the deadening effects of habit that for Shklovsky is anti-art—in these cases work, family, interminable Korean winters, self-perpetuating social roles—but their choice to pass through life as observers rather than active participants means that we are privy to their perceptions of things more than any reasoned analysis of them; as a result, we as readers perceive the world of the stories more than we analyze than: a liberating reading experience. Bae recovers sensation through meaningful insistence; in other words, she makes coffee coffeey, and snow snowy, etc.
Both of these strange stories—blending the real, hyperreal, preterreal, surreal—are synopsis-eluding and, as the author says in an interview with the Amazon journal One Day, deliberately so:
The hardest thing for me is not ‘What am I going to say?’ so much as ‘What am I not going to say?’ I like stories that speak through things that are not said directly. ‘The most suitable way to not say something’—that’s what I think of as the aesthetic of my short fiction.
The “suitable way to not say something” in these pieces of short fiction seems to have been to playfully eschew obvious narrative developments. The narrator of Nowhere to Be Found works dead-end jobs, avoids home—where her mother drinks herself into bitter rages and waits for her daughter to come home and play a sounding board for her life’s disappointments—and dates Cheolsu, a young officer-in-training who throughout the course of the story is either physically away on base, or held at emotional distance by our narrator. All of this plays out not through linear story progression, but rather as a dizzying spiral, and the eye of the storm is one cinematic scene in the middle of the novella, in which our indifferent narrator makes a trip to see Cheolsu at base one weekend, his meddlesome mother’s special home-cooked chicken in tow. The day unravels into a series of misunderstandings and false leads: when she arrives she’s told Cheolsu’s not at the base but out on training. She must take the bus and get off at the fishing hole; all buses lead to the fishing hole, she’s told. But hers doesn't; when she gets to the training ground not only is Cheolsu not there but it turns out “there were two officers-in-training here with the same name”; one of the two Cheolsus, she is told, has been in an accident.
Where was Cheolsu? Was he here? Was he there? Had the Cheolsu I was looking for died in some accident? Was he in the hospital? Or was he sitting with the other middle-class officers-in-training, surrounded by giggling girlfriends and mothers and sisters, laughing and joking over shots of alcohol, having forgotten all about me and the stupid chicken? What was real and what was fantasy? And what was it that I really wanted—reality or fantasy?
This infuriating merry-go-round of questions-upon-questions could be straight out of The Castle (Das Schloß), and readers of these stories may not be surprised to learn that Bae is the Korean translator of another of Franz Kafka’s stories featuring the character of K, A Dream (Ein Traum).
The earlier and shorter story, Highway with Green Apples shows the genesis of this tendency to vivify images and disorientate her reader, but it is nonetheless a less sophisticated prototype of Nowhere to be Found—it reads more like a literary experiment, and has a slacker rein on structure, time and the all-important repetitions. Take the whipped cream in the following passage from Highway:
The weather is cold and gray and threatens to snow. The whipped cream on top of the Viennese coffee is sprinkled with cinnamon, and the cup is warm.
“She's the daughter of a college professor, and she graduated from a top women's college. That's not the problem. The problem is how much my brother has changed because of her.”
Whipped cream is stuck to her lip.
This insistence is handed to us too easily on the plate to really jolt our expectations: it doesn't take too much imagination to read the whipped cream on the lip as a metaphor for the sweet niceties masking what the estranged cousins really want to say (our narrator's cousin, we learn, kills herself shortly after). Likewise, a pair of kitchen scissors in the same story are wielded a little heavy-handedly: at first they are the unremarkable purchase in a department store by the aforementioned woman, and when they reappear in the story, we learn, together with the narrator who provided them, that they were her suicide weapon of choice. My heart sunk at the obvious tricksiness of the scissors’ reappearance: the scissors were no more scissory. I became aware I was reading a story and was unconvinced by the twist in the story; I woke from my dreamlike state. The repetition in Nowhere, by contrast, is mood-altering, sometimes staggering in its subtlety, in particular in the last thirty or so pages where the seeds planted in the first half (words, phrases, or images you hardly bat an eye at) bloom into meaning—or rather sensation—in their repetition. Figures that at best have a poetic resonance in their first use—taxidermy, white hairs, chickens, white cliffs, crows, and fishing holes—in their unexpected recurrence made me feel like Bae had struck on a new formula for “recovering the sensation of life.”
Translator Sora Kim-Russell’s English has some part to play in this, too. A published poet, her language attends to sounds (our narrator has a finely-tuned ear, too), which heightens the sensorial experience of reading about her unexceptional life. Take this sentence at the book’s start as our protagonist describes her temp work in the university in Gyeonggi Province in South Korea: “Every person and every procedure marches on at a measured pace.” The p’s and m’s are neatly arranged as if they themselves had been churned out of the mechanical process that the paragraph goes on to describe: “That’s how things get done, just as the less delicate components of a machine submit to the will of the machine without any conscious thought or shred of volition while being ground down. So while I was busy not having any conscious thought, I became a cog.”
There’s something of Melville’s evasive scrivener, Bartleby, in the narrator of Nowhere to Be Found, to a certain extent confirmed by the author’s reiterated claim in interviews that she herself doesn’t know or want to know anything. The young narrator describes her job in the university in Gyeonggi Province in South Korea in the least committal way imaginable, her statements expanding with double negatives and subjunctive tenses indicating what is not the case:
I didn’t have too many tasks, but I also wasn’t so idle that I could have passed the time knitting. When I was working, the hours went by at what I can only call a measured pace. My salary was, of course, very small. If not for that, I might have worked there longer.
The young graduate’s evasive attitude extends to her love life (“he wasn’t my one and only boyfriend, and I wasn’t his one and only girlfriend”) and her familial relationships (“even now I think maybe my family is just a random collection of people I knew long ago and will never happen upon again, and people I don’t know yet but will meet by chance one day”). This narrator, we quickly learn, is not about to burn her bra: her entire discourse oozes deep-seated apathy and irony and there’s willfully no social message in her story. In fact, in both of these works, structures—both national and patriarchal—only rear their heads to be confirmed or ignored. In Nowhere, the protagonist’s ineffectually defiant little sister who craves a better life (to attend the school trip with her friends, to be a model, or a beautician) declares: “I’m going to be a lesbian when I grow up.” The narrator’s deadpan, perhaps sarcastic response is: “She was talking about transcending your origins and your own willpower.” Perhaps there are no obvious heroines in these works because, as Bae has said in an interview, “The place where I exist as a writer (not as a person) doesn’t ‘belong’ anywhere. Literature can be seen as an act undertaken for social solidarity; but to me, literature is just ‘me alone.’”
To tie Bae up in a discussion about marriage, education, and tradition in Korea would be foolhardy, the writer seems to be warning us. Nowhere to Be Found and Highway with Green Apples are both set in Korea, but here Seoul is a ghostly, echoing city (not the neon-bright, buzzing and humid metropolis we might have imagined) and in Nowhere the “static electricity of this ominous winter coldly dominating the whole world” is presented to us in images and objects that don’t connote any culture in particular: forgotten coats, endless snowfall, interminable bus and car trips, and gas stations at night where machines churn out instant coffee that our protagonist drinks while having pained conversations with friends or strangers, as if it were a tonic not just from the cold and company, but from an incurable illness belonging to “her alone.”  I first understood this illness, this inability to inhabit her own life, as a symptom of wanderlust, a phenomenon that could be said to be felt by the travellers in Bae’s more recent novel The Low Hills of Seoul. But the protagonist of Nowhere doesn’t have wanderlust; she is incapable of lust. When she loses her virginity to her boyfriend Cheolsu she does so consensually, but Bae makes us feel she is hardly even present in the moment. Acquiescence is no more than a silent nod, and during the act we are privy to almost all possible observations bar the physical feeling of intercourse—“the still air like jelly,” the “drop of water falling in the bathroom sounded unnaturally loud”—all of which reiterates the narrator’s “me alone” standing, her wilful absence from interactive reality. Her illness is not wanderlust, then, but perhaps fernweh, the German word translatable as “farsickness”, a kind of anti-saudade, whereby home—family, work, and Cheolsu—are, to use the W.G. Sebald’s play on words from his edited book of essays of the same title, “unheimlich heimat”  (“unhomelike homeland”): home, family, love, physical affection do not factor in the world she inhabits, other than as things to be observed in others. In one disorienting, poetic hallucinatory scene (one of many) after her and Cheolsu have sex, she says: “In truth, I was not me . . . That distant me is precious and beautiful.”
Bae relates that distant “me alone” to us with an almost preternatural poetic vision and an architect’s structural precision. The only fully inhabited space in Nowhere to Be Found is what Bae described in the same interview as the “landscape of my youth,” which she then clarified: “anxiety.” Another symptom of the narrator’s fernweh is her inability to hold down a conversation with friends, family, acquaintances or lovers, and Bae and Kim-Russell’s dialogue is convincingly stilted. Bae’s protagonist becomes truly unsettling: moving furtively through the city, trusting no one, shunning companionship, each relating only to her own thoughts, without any explanations for her actions—she is a law unto herself; an island, never anywhere to be found because there is no one to witness her. She is, in effect, a ghost, and appropriately enough this word appears for the first time in the last scene, “the center of [her] bleak hour” where she spots, in the flesh, an allegedly murderous couple she had read about (much earlier in the novel) on an old wanted sign: “It is so dark out that I see them brushing past the car like ghosts, but he [her companion] does not.” By the end of Nowhere, the narrator has fully assumed her condition as a ghostly, impervious being: “And that is how I became an absolutely meaningless thing and survived time,” she concludes.
Repetition and observation in Bae’s works are the happy symptoms of a failure to know. Paraphrasing or perhaps channelling Kafka’s famous adage that “the artist is the one who has nothing to say” she told One Day “I don’t know anything. I don’t want to know anything. Because knowing, to me, is tedious. I like to observe life without intervening, to make assumptions, to imagine, and to fictionalize.” 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. - Sophie Hughes

Bae Su-Ah, Highway with Green Apples. StoryFront, 2014.

Award-winning Korean writer Bae Suah tells the story of a young woman in search of meaning as she considers her fate in modern Seoul. For this aspiring artist, there seems to be no escape from life’s monotony. After leaving her family under the pretense of having fallen in love, she resigns herself to a solitary life rather than succumb to the relentless cultural pressure she feels to exchange her freedom for marriage. Numb to sex and unmoved by love, she begins to lose her grip on reality as those around her fall short of their own aspirations. Confused about the interplay between past and present and unsure of her own desire to live into the future, Highway with Green Apples is a surreal and mesmerizing tale of a young life slowly unraveling.



Bae Suah, Untold Nights and a Day. Jaeum & Moeum Publishing Co. 2013.

Bae Suah is a Korean novelist and translator who has published six collections of short stories, 14 novels, and numerous translations since 1993. On paper this may not look so different from the careers of other respected Korean novelists; however, Bae stands out as one of the most risk-taking, experimental writers active in Korea today. Her work from the 2000s onwards has leaned towards the novel-essay, or experimentation with what Milan Kundera dubbed “the possibilities of the novel as essay.”
      Bae Suah’s experimentation is not to pass off essays under the name of fiction, but to extend the horizons of the novel through experiments of thought. The novel is different from philosophy or an essay. Thanks to its omnivorous nature, however, the novel is in a unique position to draw inspiration from and rewrite philosophical thought and introspective essays. Bae is one of the few Korean writers to navigate this terra incognita of thought and introspection. In her latest work, Untold Nights and a Day, she takes a visit to the mysterious theater of dreams.
      The story is set in Seoul, but as is customary in her novels, the setting of Untold Nights and a Day intentionally resembles a strange, dream-like city. “The name of the city was ‘secret.’ It was a city where all the windows were dark, all the windows were silent, all the windows were opaque, and all the windows were lost in introspection.” The protagonist Ayami, a former actress who now works as part of the staff at Audio Theater, is Korean. She appears, however, to be more like a foreigner who is new to the city of Seoul.
      Character and setting are explicit yet dreamlike in Bae’s novels. The action of her novels is written the same way. Untold Nights and a Day opens with the flatly descriptive sentence, “Former actress Ayami was sitting on the second step of Audio Theater, holding a guest book in her hand.” However this sentence is merely an oblique entrance pointing towards the theater of dreams. A series of mysterious events transpire and we are introduced to a number of eccentric characters that are unrelated to each other but whose actions share symmetry not unlike that of a pantomime.
      The narrator relies on the auditory and tactile rather than the visual when describing characters and objects, a cross-sensory alchemy that works to form the novel’s dreamlike yet beautiful style. “I am the product of your imagination” is probably this novel’s equivalent to Freud’s “dream’s navel.” The familiar and unfamiliar, native and foreign tongues, and reality and dreams are juxtaposed with meticulous precision, calling for the world inside and outside the text to dream of and mate with each other. And so a text that one imagines might only exist inside a dream walks out into reality.
      Untold Nights and a Day is full of minute presences emitting signals “like unknown voices.” A whispering voice urges you, the reader, to read this novel out loud instead of to yourself, to listen rather than to read. One actually feels compelled to do so when reading the novel. And so the novel performs the theater of chasing voices from within and without, all in pursuit of the secret of being. - Bok Dohoon

Bae Su-Ah: After Sebald – a tribute

Q&A: Translator Deborah Smith speaks to Korean writer in residence, Suah Bae:
Your early writing was seen as more traditionally realist, but since the 2000s you've become very experimental, focusing more on language and form than plot and character. Did your 2001 move to Germany have something to do with this shift? Were you influenced by certain German writers, or simply by living in a foreign place and language?
I'm not influenced by a particular German writer. I debuted as a writer with a first complete short story without any preparation, and brought out a number of novels and short stories after that, all while experimenting with various types of writing. I think my writing was always changing. I've never been convinced that it's worth announcing 'This is my writing! This is my literature!' But the experience of going to Germany and living there on my own, in a place where I had neither friends nor fixed employment, an environment where the language was totally incomprehensible to me, really brought home to me that loneliness particular to writers. So you could say that it intensified the way my writing was changing then. These days, I'm looking to deepen the fairytale-like atmosphere of my very earliest short stories, which I wrote without any kind of writerly self-consciousness. I've written several new stories that try to do just that. In fact, I myself don't know how my writing will change in the future. But I enjoy that kind of uncertainty.
From 2008 you began translating German writers such as W.G. Sebald, and using German as a bridge language, non-German writers such as Fernando Pessoa and Sadeq Hedayat. How do you think the act/art of translation has influenced your own writing?
As a writer, it's true that my own style comes through when I translate. Perhaps because of that, certain readers have said that when they read one of the works I've translated, it feels similar to reading one of my own works of fiction. But I'm not sure about the opposite case. Encountering good works of literature through translating them is like a particularly productive reading experience. But as for the act of translation itself, I don't think it has any particular influence on my writing separate from the process of translation of natural language that comes up when I read a book in German.
When I first put a sentence into Korean, I tend to concentrate more on that sentence as it stands rather than thinking about the larger text it came from. This means it gradually becomes mine, so much so that later I even end up forgetting that I translated it from another original text. Indeed, from a certain point of view translation can be as 'active' as writing your own fiction.
Your recent books seem especially concerned with what Milan Kundera called the “possibilities of the novel as essay”, but also close to essays in the original sense of being 'attempts'. They also have very strong shared themes – are they part of an ongoing 'attempt' at a certain kind of writing?
I don't place any great stock in genre divisions in my writing. Discriminating between poetry and fiction, fiction and essay is a really peripheral issue when compared to the enjoyment we get from that writing, or how it moves us. I often hear that my writing is considered essayistic, but in fact I've never stopped experimenting with how to draw out a certain story in a consistent manner. In other words, I'm concerned with telling a story, and I don't think it's all that important whether this story takes the form of an essay, a fairytale, or a traditional novel. What literary theorists say about literature doesn't hold much appeal for me. For me, there is no other issue for literature than “the beauty of the text making us tremble”.
As for my recent works, rather than setting up language or music as direct, surface themes, I've tried to place the phenomena of life in the border between the real and the surreal and puzzle them out in language particular to such a state. I believe humans are sad because they have to die, and it's this sadness that drives them to create literature. In that sense, rather than being an activity grounded in knowledge, I'm more inclined to the view that literature is a way of mourning existence.
How have you found your stay in Norwich so far? What's your view of the literary culture here?
The first day I came to Norwich, I felt: Ah, I'll be truly sad to leave this place. As this is my first trip to England, I'm entirely ignorant about the country as a whole. But Norwich, despite being a small city, seems to have a lively literary scene with a great variety of events. On top of that, the beautiful alleyways have made a deep impression on me.
Seoul, where I was born and brought up, is a huge city, as is Berlin, where I lived for a long time. And so when I go to a big city like New York, there's no big shock. But I'm able to get by perfectly happily in very quiet, secluded places too. That's because I'm not particularly fond of going out, other than for a gentle walk. I tend to stay at home to eat my meals drink my coffee. I don't like going to big events or places where there are lots of people.
When I translate, I'm generally at home. I sit on my favourite chair at my favourite desk and concentrate for a long time. But when I'm writing fiction, I enjoy a change of scene. Just like now. Rather than actively attempting to find some kind of specific external stimulus, all I need are subtle changes in the chemical environment that surrounds me – somewhere where the air and clouds are different, the voices and languages I hear are different. I enjoy the effect it has on me, however passively. Now, in Norwich, I'm ready to start writing something.
I don't actually know that much about British literature, but I'm captivated by the beauty of form in Virginia Woolf's writing, a beauty that has nothing feeble about it. The way she presents drama also interests me. For example, the final scene in Mrs Dalloway, and the two very short chapters in To the Lighthouse, made a deep impression. I've also enjoyed Doris Lessing's fiction – The Golden Notebook and her short stories – and the way J.M. Coetzee described his lonely, depressed life as a foreigner in London in Youth stayed with me for a long time. When I was young, I liked books by the Bronte sisters. Particularly Jane Eyre. And I especially liked Eleanor Farjeon's fairytales. As I grew older, I liked her stories even more. I still like them now! I remember them as being different from other fairytales.
Are there any particular South Korean writers you would recommend?
One Korean writer I like is Park Sang-ryung. But there is an awful lot of specialised vocabulary to do with Buddhism, Hinduism, philosophy in his fiction, as well as archaisms and dialect, so it isn't easy to read even for Koreans. He now visits Korea regularly from his home in Canada, and is continuing to write, but I've heard he isn't publishing his writing any more.
 -literature.britishcouncil.org/news/2014/may/qa-suah-bae

Bae Su-Ah, A Greater Music, Trans. by Deborah Smith, Open Letter, 2016.




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.
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. (Read an Excerpt)


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.” - Publishers Weekla


A Greater Music feels very much like an author's autobiographical working-through of a specific period in her life -- as did Bae Suah's earlier work, Nowhere to Be Found. Here, the young South Korean narrator revisits time spent in Germany, and two relationships she had there -- with student-metalworker Joachim, a modern-day proletarian, and the sickly (more) intellectual M.
       The narrator begins the novel by describing her relationship to (especially classical) music, noting also that even as it appealed to her in her youth more than, for example, music by the pop group ABBA, she set it aside in favor of what her classmates listened to, deferring: "to the tastes and opinions of the group". Attempts to 'fit in' aren't particularly successful; the narrator remains very much an island to herself, as is frequently made clear in her story -- most obviously in one of the few crowds scenes, when she attends a New Year's party with Joachim (and they find themselves riding off practically alone in a tram at midnight -- under (fairly harmless but certainly loud and bright firecracker-)assault much of the way).
       Initially, M was the narrator's language-tutor, but their relationship quickly developed into something more serious and intimate, and they even lived together. Eventually, the narrator had to decide on her future -- whether she wanted to remain with (or rather return to: there are immigration-hurdles) M in Germany, or whether they should go their separate ways.
       Language and literature always were significant for the narrator. She notices how many -- and what -- books people have, for example, and having learned to read before she started school she was ahead of the other kids and often followed her own reading rather than the teacher in class (again setting her apart). In Germany, she must deal with a new language, which she is not particularly comfortable in yet. She does find some books -- including one by Jakob Hein (yes, the son of leading East German author Christoph (Willenbrock, etc.)), an author that Bae Suah would go on to translate (a somewhat unusual choice -- it doesn't seem to have occurred to anyone to translate his work into English, for example, and it seems extremely unlikely anyone would bother).
       Music stands in contrast to language. The narrator mentions that she studied music as a child but soon gave it up, and that she was: "utterly devoid of musical talent". (In a nice touch, she gives up piano and violin lessons: "in favor of learning a computer programming language".) Yet a fascination with music remains, and she contrasts it with language and literature at even the most personal level: 
     If only M had taught me music rather than language. [...] If our conversations had revolved around music, rather than language, then I might never have learned anything about her, or the opposite, ended up knowing everything there was to know. She would have been either utterly beyond my grasp, or utterly in my possession. 
       A Greater Music is an effective novel of the ebbs and flows of relationships and time, the narrator's looking back a realistic back and forth across a longer period of time that is now jumbled and overlapping. Much remains unexplained, as the narrator describes some events in detail (taking care of Joachim's dog while he is away) while glossing over much else (like the nature and extent of her relationship with Joachim).
       The narrator is very much a writer -- a person for whom the act of writing is essential, and one that allows her to come to terms with her reality and experiences. Experiences in a foreign language -- with the limitations that imposes, of understanding and communication -- as well as the relationship with music, which she has even less command over than language, and yet which also affect her at a fundamental level, reinforce the idea of her trying to get a grasp on things through her writing.
       While the narrator in Nowhere to Be Found drifts similarly, A Greater Music feels both slacker and more ambitious -- but doesn't come together as neatly. Much about it impresses, but it perhaps still feels too close to being in the working-through process. So also the closing paragraph begins: "At my desk I continue to write", as she has not yet reached any finality. - M.A.Orthofer