Recitation

About

A mysterious actress turned wanderer meets a nameless emigrant chorus and begins to share her story — or stories, or performances of stories, the distinction dissolving as her narration proceeds. Identity, memory, and personhood become unstable categories, each recitation reshaping both the teller and the tale. Su-a Pae's novel operates at the boundary between fiction and philosophy, using its enigmatic structure to explore what it means to be a person when the self is understood as something performed rather than possessed. The actress is both character and concept — a figure who exists only in the act of speaking. A novel about the stories we tell to become ourselves — and the unsettling possibility that the self is nothing more than the telling.