Life is a mystery composed of scraps of memory and ghostly projections of a future whose sole background is the end of everything. Jean-Marie Le Clezio is a portraitist of that life concentrated in his characters determined to unravel everything from a fiction in which any approach is possible, encompassing a composition of basic, everyday concepts, about that character who awaits answers on the other side of the mirror when we remain absorbed in looking our reflection.
For the occasion of this Bitna novel under the Seoul sky, We glimpse the particular world of a young Bitna who arrived in the great city of Seoul, the capital of the friendly Seoul, condescending to our western world, but ultimately twinned with the north of the same wayward and threatening country. The trip to the capital is not an easy transit. She is a niece added to the trip for the rest of a family united by her direct consanguinity and for which Bitna can only assume the condition of servitude.
Young but determined. Bitna does not agree with her aunt's determining factors and carves out that uncertain destiny for a woman who is almost a child in a city capable of corrupting everything, from power to youth. Luckily Bitna finds Cho, the old bookseller who welcomes her for the particular task of reviving Salomé, a girl who only in the company of someone still young can once again feel that there is life from her most cruel physical limitations.
Soon Salomé discovers that with Bitna and her stories she can leave her own body and walk, run, even love other people who live with her in new worlds never imagined. The triangle between Bitna, Salomé and Cho closes a magnetic space between its vertices. Each of the characters show us a vision of the world from the pain, the shortcomings, the need and the drive to survive despite everything.
With a cadence in tune with the oriental, the enigmatic future of the three characters is presented to us as a mystery that moves between the fictional settings shared by the girls to the wishes of a transforming reality that could heal the wounded heart of the Mr. Cho, longing for his family, located in that north of a country that has become the last great victim of the Second World War that still separates souls today.
The great complications or political derivatives compose contradictions, metaphors, allegories of estrangement and alienation. the Nobel Le Clézio addresses these extremes played in the narrative with a simple and dynamic language at the same time that it awakens deep human concerns.
You can now buy the novel "Bitna under the Seoul sky", by Jean-Marie Le Clézio, here: