Between numerous misunderstandings and fleeting understandings,

Sou Linne Baik’s delicate and fluid rays of words

cross the space between indistinct language and distinct silence

Lying Practice, Sou Linne Baik’s debut novella and the opening piece of the revised edition, is the prototype of Baik’s following works of fiction; it allowed a glimpse at the solid themes and writing skills that she would later develop, highly praised that “it’s not easy to portray a deeply profound topic that questions the reality lacking words and communication in such a calm and persuasive manner.” (novelists Park Bum Shin and Im Chulwoo, judges of the 2011 Kyunghyang Spring Literary Contest)

After suffering a certain trauma, the narrator flees to a foreign country and feels lonely amid silence. She believes plausible lies are more convenient than shabby truths and remains silent, skeptical of the possibility of transparent communication, which was impossible even in her own country. Nevertheless, she wishes to try speaking once again after facing certain moments—a taste of the sweet, soft cake prepared just for her, an indescribably beautiful scenery, a gaze wanting to understand even though it may be impossible, and the fact that “we are still constantly talking to each other.”

It does not matter whether our words are true or false; if there exists only a single truth, it is the very act of ours constantly talking to one another, that and only that.

In the following title story Falling in Paul, the narrator, a Korean instructor, gives Korean lessons to Paul, a Korean American student of hers. In his poor Korean, Paul talks about his issues with his father and about Yuriko, a Japanese student he has a crush on. The narrator asks Paul, “How do you love her when you can’t even communicate with her?” (p. 43) But as she listens to his stories, she starts to fall for him as he seeped into her life “like a raindrop that scatters the world of tidy sentences.” (p. 45) Her love, “never given a plausible name before” (p. 65) in her native language, is now named “falling in Paul” only after passing through the unfamiliar and imperfect language of Paul.

The short story collection also includes stories such as The Potato’s Disappearance , which depicts a character’s confusion after realizing that people call the animal they know as “potato” turns out to be called “dog,” and When a Flowering Night Falls , a story of a wife whose husband can utter only unintelligible fragments of words after an accident, all of which portrays the chaos that the language we take for granted leaves us or engulfs us.