Milena, Milena, Ecstatic
byBae Suah
Translated by Deborah Smith
About
A woman in Seoul becomes obsessed with Milena Jesenská — Kafka's lover, journalist, resistance fighter — and begins dissolving the borders between their lives. Bae Suah's narrative drifts between contemporary Korea, wartime Prague, and something that might be dream, as the narrator channels Milena's voice, her defiance, her desire. This is Bae Suah at her most formally daring. The prose moves like music rather than plot — leitmotifs repeating, identities blurring, time folding — demanding a reader willing to surrender the need for stable ground. What emerges isn't biography or fiction but something stranger: a meditation on how we inhabit the lives of women history tried to reduce to footnotes.
