Swell - by Bo-Mi Son (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Each story in Swell launches from the common but pivotal moments that determine the course of everyday life, but they're often filtered through the perspective of someone else: documentarians, novelists, storytellers, gossips. Then, as the stories build atop one another and intertwine, they begin to shift and destabilize. Characters return but their histories are changed, alternate timelines open, and no one is ever who they were.

Like an optical illusion this book offers two complete pictures. Viewed as individual stories, contemporary Korean lives are rendered with sensitivity and realism--relationships tatter and bereaved loved-ones search for ways to move on. Viewed as a complete collection, though, a stranger narrative emerges, in which there is perhaps some invisible logic behind everything, incomprehensible to us. Wholly original, Swell, translated by Janet Hong, is a book full of trap doors, hidden passageways, and the unsolvable mystery behind everyday life.

Review Quotes

"Son Bo-mi is a trailblazer."--Korean Literature Now

"A very interesting meditation on how we get where we are, the consequences of choices we make, what choices are made for us, and perhaps even the madness life we would undergo were we able to go back in time and 'change' things."--Korean Literature in Translation