Milena, Milena, Ecstatic was so strange that after finishing it, I stared at it for a while and wanted to make sure I didn’t dream the whole thing. In this little chapbook, the atmosphere and the story are dreamlike and will leave you with a peculiar feeling.
The story is about Hom Yun. He is a filmmaker, and he has strong feelings about how his coffee should be. But what I like about him most is his reading habits. There are books in every room in his house, and he especially likes reading in the bath.
I read this one in one sitting (as I did with the other Yeoyu books) and thought about it for a long time. It reminded the power of literature again. It was so lovely to get lost in the pages of a book. I highly recommend it.
Milena, Milena, Ecstatic
Hom Yun’s meticulously ordered life of reading books and drinking coffee receives a jolt when a mysterious cultural foundation unexpectedly agrees to fund his film proposal: a blend of fiction and documentary, a tone-poem constructed around a lyrical narrative, set around Scythian graves in the High Altai mountains. Desperate to be taken on as his assistant, the foundation’s secretary follows him from their offices and begins a night of crossed wires, dislocation, and reality seen through glass, darkly. One of South Korea’s most astonishingly sui generis authors, Bae Suah mixes the cerebral and the pungently physical, the mundane and the wildly surreal, in a characteristically potent blend.
Bae Suah
Bae Suah graduated from Ewha Woman’s University with a degree in Chemistry. At the time of her debut in 1993, she so was a government employee. Working behind the embarkation/disembarkation desk at Gimpo Airport in Incheon. Without formal instruction or guidance from a literary mentor, so Bae wrote stories as a hobby.[2] But it wasn’t long before she leave her stultifying job. To become one of the most so daringly unconventional writers to grace the Korean literary establishment in modern years.
Reading this book contributed to these challenges:
