Let ‘Swell’ Expand Your Reality

“There are so many things we’ll never understand,” Jang tells an unnamed writer in “Blanket,” the opening story of Swell. “But when it’s our time to go, we’ll know, won’t we? One day we’ll understand the reason for everything, don’t you think?”

“Do you really believe that?” I asked, choking up. “That we’ll know one day?”

Flushed with drink, Jang snickered. “Of course not.”

Published this month by Two Lines Press, Swell is Korean author Son Bo-Mi’s latest English-language short story collection, translated by Janet Hong. The nine stories are previously uncollected together in any language and traverse many relationships: unhappy couples, grieving parents and children and — most interestingly in the collection — the tension between genius artists and scientists and their work. But all are destabilizing, playing with layered storytelling and unreliable storytellers.

Swell
By Son Bo-Mi, Translated by Janet Hong
Publisher Two Lines Press; 240 pages

The stories that bookend Swell – “Blanket” and “Blimp” – tell the same narrative in mirrored ways: a father and teenage son with a strained relationship go to a rock concert, where violence ensues. In “Blanket,” the son dies at the show, and his father sits with his grief for the story’s duration. In “Blimp,” neither dies, but the father sustains injuries that plague him for the rest of his life and contribute to an early death.

Though they’re two distinct, self-contained stories, the traumas resound throughout each universe. In the latter story, “Blimp,” the son encounters a UFO, a disc suspended in the air that’s sometimes glowing red or resembling an eye.

“It’s going to take me to another world, he thought. In that world, I won’t lose the people I love in the way I lost them here,” Son writes. “In that world, my mother will still be alive. My father will have never hurt his leg…And Babe Ruth – he wouldn’t have gone mute. No, in that world, he would have lived and died as a truly great baseball player. And in that world – he thought. I would have died at the Parcel concert.”

These stories highlight what Son is best at: realities that feel equally possible and insane. We see this on steroids in the genre-bending “Give Them the Lindy Hop” and “The Love of a Scientist,” two short stories masquerading as journalism. Throughout Swell, I found myself stopping to google what from Son’s alternate reality was true in mine. Did I miss that Babe Ruth was an actor? Were director Gil Gwang-yong and physicist Gordon Gould real people? And were their love lives as complex as in their stories?

In blurring the lines between fact and fiction, Son forces readers to pay attention and makes her everyday characters all the more compelling. Couples fall in and out of love, families grieve, and miscommunications run rampant. Everyone might be cheating.

In “A Table For Six,” one of my favorites, three couples sit down for a dinner party with very fraught vibes. The unnamed narrator’s wife is on the verge of tears. When she accuses her husband of cheating with another woman present, Yoon’s wife, readers expect him to put her mind at ease and laugh it off. “It must be some tasteless joke,” he thinks to himself, confident that he is not, in fact, cheating. But then Yoon’s wife breaks down in tears and apologizes for kissing the narrator.

“What the hell is happening?” he thinks, and later, “When they’re gone, I sink into my chair. What happened that day at the lake? Did something really happen between me and Yoon’s wife? … My head starts spinning. Then why did she say those things? Did something really happen?”

Son leaves us, along with her narrator, with no clarity. Maybe he cheated and forgot; maybe it was in another universe; or maybe Yoon’s wife is lying. The story left me with a pit in my stomach.

Her use of perspective is also fun. Son inserts herself as a character in “Give Them the Lindy Hop,” and characters from one story appear in others, as the world of Swell grows. Her narrators are often third parties to the stories themselves, like journalists or documentarians, and are often unreliable. The collection has some incredibly playful writing and craft, made all the more enjoyable by Hong’s translation.

For the past week, since finishing the collection, I have been pondering its title – Swell – which, in my reading, appears nowhere in the text itself. But Son’s world, stacking realities on top of each other in an interlinking web, is undeniably huge. I can imagine them continuing, long beyond the last lines of “Blimp,” out into the ever-expanding universe like the story’s hovering UFO. What Son has begun here is only the beginning.