Review of A Greater Music by Bae Suah

*A Greater Music* by Bae Suah, translated by Deborah Smith (2016). Published by Open Letter.

If you’re new here, and stumbled upon this blog through the mythical powers of the Internet, welcome! I know a lot of visitors to my website are people who randomly come upon this website through search engines like Google, but I also do have a lot of visitors who come back. Regardless: my name is Ashley, and I started this blog in order to keep track of everything I’m coming across in the world.

This blog post is interesting to me because lately, I’ve been struggling to get in my reading time. I was working for the longest time as a freelancer and contractor, but recently pivoted to an 8-5 job where I’m in an office. It’s not hybrid, so I’m always at home trying to put the puzzle pieces together of how I’ll get my reading done. I also continue working on this blog when I’m not at work, so the Instagram reels I’m fed about a 5-9 feel too real right now.

Anyways, I am trying to find that time to read here and there. Somehow I’m still on track for my Goodreads goal, even though I’ve been slowly giving up on the notion of reading goals in life. I think they can be a little too much pressure and takes the fun off of reading at the end of the day, and I want to read because I want to stay in touch with literature while also pursuing my side career as a writer.

One of the books I’ve been chipping away at after my job has been A Greater Music. A lot of my purpose with this blog has been to push myself to watch different kinds of books and movies, essentially diversifying the perspectives I’m consuming on a daily basis. However, I know my weakness is Korean literature in translation, as well as broader Asian diaspora literature.

I did my master’s thesis on Korean colonial women’s literature and methodologies of resistance, which taps into this particular fascination. Bae Suah though has been a writer I want to read and have been talking about wanting to read for a while, but never really got around to. It seemed like the right time, so I picked this up when I was looking for something to read.

It’s a quick read, so let’s get into the review! I don’t want to bore you with the introduction.

A Korean woman living in Germany reflects on in-betweenness, music, and her romantic relationships.

While this is a relatively short novel in translation, something to remember when picking this novel up specifically is that it is quite abstract. There’s a lot of loose conceptual things being thrown at you, as the reader, and you have to do the legwork to understand how this all comes together to reflect the kaleidoscope of this woman’s life.

At the beginning of the novel our narrator, a woman who has been living in Berlin and struggling with her life as someone in the diaspora and trying to make a life somewhere different than where she’s from, falls into an ivy river. She has been housesitting from one of two men in her life, and as she falls into the river, she contemplates her life.

She came to Berlin three years ago, and a core part of her experiences has not only been struggling with the language, culture, and country as a whole, but with her personal relationships as well. The man whose house she was sitting for, Joachim, is someone who is rough on the outside and a metalworker.

Then there’s M. M is someone who compliments our narrator much more, as Joachim is someone who is, as I mentioned before, a bit rough on the edges and doesn’t seem to fit her well. M is someone she can have intellectual discussions with and debate about the nature of our existence and music, and we see how these two might actually be in a relationship as we read further into her memories and reflections.

Our narrator is someone obsessed with music and its philosophy, which is why this is titled A Greater Music. A core concept that stood out to me is the relationship between death and music, which is sparked from the discussion of falling into the river and actually facing death for the first time.

The nonlinear narrative layered with these nuanced discussions tends to make this a dense read throughout, so if you’re not paying attention to some of the finer points, then you might miss something that is actually critical for this story.

Overall Thoughts

This was a gorgeous novel to read, although I did have to think a lot more while I was reading it. That’s not bad at all and something I think about a lot when I pick up a book, but this specifically was something I don’t know if I was prepared for because of how I was coming home from work with my brain already a little bit fried.

Anyways, I did enjoy the process of reading this novel. I could see some of myself in this narrator, even though she does come across as a bit unlikeable at times. I also questioned her relationship with Joachim, as she was a proper fit for M, so I wondered if she was seeing Joachim as a way to try and become more assimilated with the culture.

I’d say pick this one up if you’re interested in the story, have the time, and want to think about it beyond picking the book up. I wish I could give this more time, especially considering how gorgeous the prose was, but I wasn’t in the proper headspace for this book. I do think it’s a great book and gorgeous though, which is why I would really recommend it to other readers who are interested and have the time.

Pick it up at your local indie bookstore or library! Support those spaces if you get the chance.

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