LTI Korea 
DLKL 
SIWF 
[KOREAN] A Precious Realization to Carry into the New Year scrap
by Son Jeong Seung
Translated by Léo-Thomas Brylowski
March 6, 2025
Author Bio 작가 소개
Baik Sou Linne
I love listening to a musician’s debut album. It contains an innocent kind of joy that vanishes in their later works. They’ve yet to make a name for themselves and the future lies wide open, allowing them to take a leap of faith and release melodies into the world that they’d previously kept all to themselves. Sadly, many artists fade away after their first album, and those who do succeed often lose the spark that made them special as they try to replicate their initial success. But here is one artist who, after years of winning hearts, is celebrating the tenth anniversary of her debut—the writer Sou Linne Baik. A revised edition of her debut short story collection Falling in Paul has just been released in 2024.
The nine stories in this collection are bursting with life. Some are firmly rooted in reality, some feel more dreamlike, and some blur the boundaries between fantasy and reality. Baik herself had doubts about these stories, and initially had no intention of turning them into one cohesive book. Instead, she simply indulged in the joy of exploring each narrative world on its own terms. After reading all nine, however, I noticed two threads that tie them together.
First, the protagonists in each story are all grappling with mental struggles or with circumstances that evoke empathy from the reader. For instance, “Lying Practice” centers around a woman who lives apart from her unfaithful husband and goes abroad to study. In “Falling in Paul,” a woman in her mid-thirties narrates her secret, one-sided love. In “Potato Gone Missing,” the narrator discovers that what they had firmly believed to be a potato was actually seen by everyone else as a dog, a revelation which strips them of their ability to speak. The characters in each of these stories reveal a shared sense of inevitability in their emotions and futures.
“That was when I first realized how easily someone else’s life could be reduced to a cliché in just a few sentences,” writes the author in “Lying Practice.”
However, Baik herself resists such reductionism, ensuring that no character is ever confined to a stereotype. She gives detailed portrayals that not only explain the protagonist’s emotions, but also vividly describe their surroundings to make her depictions come to life. She doesn’t attempt to justify her characters’ actions or existence, instead relying on nuanced portrayals that allow readers to feel her profound empathy for humanity and the world, which has become a signature of her writing.
Secondly, her characters often find themselves in unfamiliar situations that leave them at a loss for words. Again in “Lying Practice,” Baik writes that “In reality, none of us thought we fully understood what the other person was trying to say. We never deluded ourselves into thinking our words were getting across perfectly. Yet, despite this, we continued talking.”
Baik’s writing subtly captures non-verbal cues that seem indescribable. We often forget that communication is not limited to spoken words, but also includes non-verbal elements. At first glance, her characters’ conversations might appear disjointed, yet through Baik’s lens, they unfold just as they were intended. Fiction plays a vital role in helping us understand others in a world that often doesn’t make sense. By stepping into the lives of fictional characters, we enhance our capacity to empathize and connect with others. While there will always be people and forms of communication we cannot fully grasp, simply acknowledging their existence makes us better equipped to listen—whether we are conscious of it or not. In this sense, reading fiction, which is a non-verbal act in itself, becomes an attempt to connect with others.
At first, I thought the enjoyment I felt came from reading someone’s “first” work, but by the time I turned the final page, I realized that I was making a conscious effort to connect with others. Starting the new year with this realization feels even more meaningful, as it offers hope for building connections with new and unfamiliar people. It feels like a nudge of encouragement to continue reading fiction and to never stop seeking connection with others—a precious gift to carry into the year ahead.
Translated by Léo-Thomas Brylowski
Son Jeong Seung
Writer, Anyway, Drums (Hugo Books, 2022),
The Words of Jeolla (UU Press, 2024)
Writer 필자 소개
Son Jeong Seung
Translator 번역가 소개
Léo-Thomas Brylowski
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