Swell

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.

Source: Amazon

[At time of upload we were unable to identify the original Korean title of the story collection. One AI chatbot suggests, while refusing to cite a source, that it’s 우아한 밤과 고양이들 (2018) (A Graceful Night and Cats) and that the collection was re-titled for the English-speaking market. Other AI chatbots are unable to guess at the title.]