Ha Seong-Nan's Flowers of Mold

Usually it's probably a bad thing when prose elicits comparison to David Lynch, but Ha Seong-Nan pulls off her stories' realistic weirdening with satisfying flair.

This post originally appeared on my website in Jan 2020.

[Open Letter; 212 pp. Translated from the Korean by Janet Hong]

It must have been quite a while since I read a story collection, to be honest; I don’t tend to attach myself to them conceptually as much as longer constructions, for whatever reason: perhaps the continuous disconnection of starting and stopping that less intuitively-joined sets of stories require, rather than enabling reading in short bursts, as seems to be the major trend now, dissuades me from coming back, without the nails in the flesh that longer works allow; the trail of crumbs, the glue between. With a title like Flowers of Mold, though, and with the evocative descriptions of Ha’s “disturbing just below the surface” approach, I let myself in, and was pleasantly moved by the mechanics of what the construction of these stories, which do intertwine in oblique ways, allow to synthesize and build.

The most surprising thing, for me, about Ha’s method is her ability to create a logical, clear-uttered world that nonetheless continues to undo and reform itself simply by the bizarre range of sentences and details she weaves in. Surprising twists in sentence-ry are no new thing, for sure, and in fact can get old in being predictable in their surprising-ness, which all too fast becomes not-surprising because we are already used to being supposedly surprised, thanks to the late 90s wave of American short story makers who inadvertently co-signed the quirky voice that would, and often still does, characterize a certain kind of McSweeney’s-adjacent voice. So much of it eventually being mirrors reflecting mirrors reflecting something by now commodified to be “the way that we get weird,” which of course isn’t weird at all unless you haven’t read it: the state of many.

Ha’s weirdness, though, sentence-to-sentence, is all its own. For once, the weird-for-weird’s sake (which I do dig when done right) isn’t the mechanism, but seems to be instead just the way her stories must be told. The sentences are clear, describing action that sometimes connects to larger movements within the story, or the set of stories, but also may just be the way the information comes together, seeming chaotic when in fact it is of-order; the same way that Lynch’s films have a logic all their own. She seems, often, to be describing many different strands of action all at once, without always bothering to connect them directly, logically, above-board, but to instead leave gaps where the reader can jump right alongside her, creating vast momentum in small space.