Music serves as a vivid and tactile metaphor for the universality of language and human emotion in Bae Suah's haunting novel of memories and regret over lost love. A Greater Music focuses on a Korean writer recalling a road trip in the German countryside with her sickly lover M, a woman who tutored the writer in German and whose twin loves of music and literature matched her own interests.
The story weaves between her memories of M and two future moments: one when the writer has nearly drowned in an icy lake, and the other when she has abandoned M and is cohabiting with Joachim--an on-again, off-again, penny-pinching boyfriend who is quick to blame the writer for the slightest perceived grievances. Joachim leaves the writer to take an apprenticeship as a welder, and the writer is left alone to wander the streets of Berlin and ruminate over her failed relationship with M. She indulges in digressions about the artistic superiority of composers Dmitri Shostakovich and Bernd Alois Zimmermann and writer Jakob Hein; she contrasts them with what she perceives as the banality of conventional interests and "mental shallowness, poverty of thought" among the masses--until she comes to realize her painful role in "the greater music" of M's heartache.
Suah, a celebrated Korean writer whose first English-translated novel, Nowhere to Be Found, was longlisted for a PEN Translation Prize, writes with a floating, lyrical complexity that resembles the sharpness and ambivalence of a Shostakovich symphony, while maintaining the aura of emotional detachment, self-blame and soul-searching that is characteristic of the best Dostoevsky and Orwell stories. --Nancy Powell, freelance writer and technical consultant