Review originally appeared in SHELF AWARENESS: https://www.shelf-awareness.com/readers-issue.html?issue=925#m16197

Review cross-posted to my Smithsonian BookDragon blog: http://smithsonianapa.org/bookdragon/untold-night-and-day-by-bae-suah-translated-by-deborah-smith-in-shelf-awareness/ .

For a book that seems move so slowly, it was an unnerving book to read. And as the advertising boasted its a totally original novel.

Interesting read, but at times a bit too slow for me. I also thought that it seemed to drag in spots.

Moving haunting a story that draws you into this woman’s fevered night her life .This is so unique literary fiction at its best unique original.A small gem of a story that I will be recommending.highly .#netgalley#abramsbooks,

This book reads like déjà vu feels. Equal parts unnerving and exhilarating.

Ayami is a young woman recently unemployed after working as the sole employee of an audio theater in Seoul. She doesn't have any prospects for the future but neither does she seem much concerned about it. Bhuta is a middle-aged man who owned and operated a Chinese textiles company before it went under. Since then he has delivered medication to the house-bound in Seoul for a living. To be honest, the details of the lives of the characters don't matter very much. The characters are fluid and at times interchangeable. If that sounds bizarre to you, you'd be exactly right.

Drenched in the languid summer heat of the hottest week of the year in Seoul, this story reads more like a mirage, or memory, shifting aimlessly between the present and past, one perspective and another. The result is a visceral experience that reminds oneself of the inescapable summer humidity in a dense metropolis where your sandals stick to the asphalt and your mind wanders. With the unending heat comes a timelessness and a sense of unreality.

I'm really so, so impressed with this book. It perfectly accomplishes what it sets out to do. It feels like a trance and only in its moments of extreme surrealism was I pleasantly startled out of my mesmerization. It's a little slip of a book and absolutely worth the read. It has so much re-read potential, I see myself getting more out it on every pass.

Very interesting and unique read; Untold Night and Day takes place over a single day but it is a moving journey.

So this book wasn't very long (only 160 pages), yet it felt long when I was reading it and I very nearly could not finish it at all. It was confusing, to say the least, and I kind of felt like I was reading a short story for school — one that I didn't understand and needed a teacher to break down for me.

It was definitely very dialed in at the beginning, and Ayami's feelings of having failed in multiple careers and being at a standstill — it was all very relatable. Then the craziness started and the description "fever dream" started to make sense. This book was the definition of deja vu and though it was cool to see how certain scenes came back around, at some point you just want to move on. And for that reason, I felt intrigued by the first and last twenty pages and less interested in the rest.

But the writing was indeed really beautiful, the repetitive scenes really added to the surrealism of the story. Artistically and narratively, it's a style I can appreciate. It's a little like Nova Ren Suma, one of my favorite authors, on steroids — either you love the inundation of metaphors and symbolism, or it all goes right over your head, and for this book, I fear it was the latter.

I do feel like this might've been a better experience for me if I had read it all in one sitting and so I wouldn't have forgotten what happened previously, but I tried to read it in one sitting and honestly couldn't do it. I might still recommend it to people who like experimental novels that read like stream-of-consciousness, but it wasn't my style.

This was a mesmerizing and contemplative narrative, completely absent of plot but rich in observation and imagery and juxtapositions. Parts of the prose felt fevered with their effectively utilized repetitions of said imagery (smallpox marks, fatal incidents with buses, white animals). I really enjoyed this, and if you enjoy other works that Deborah Smith has translated (namely Han Kang), suspect this is one you'll also connect with.

The e-pub I read didn't have a translators note - I'd looked for it specifically after watching a review that expressly mentioned how helpful this was to explain aspects like the choice to use "untold" in the title, for example.