Bitna: Under the Sky of Seoul

By J.M.G. Le Clézio

An exploration of Seoul — its landscape and its stories
by Nobel Prize winner J. M. G. Le Clézio

The French writer and Nobel Literature laureate J. M. G. Le Clézio has harbored a keen interest in Korea that not only prompted him to learn and master the Korean language on his own but also inspired his new novel. Bitna: Under the Sky of Seoul is Le Clézio’s portrait of Seoul—its people and its places—rendered with an intimate familiarity and attention to detail that few non-Korean writers, not to mention non-natives of the Seoul, could replicate. It is a story of life in the city as it is being lived today.
The eponymous main character, Bitna, is a nineteen-year-old in her first year at university, and a recent transplant to Seoul from Jeolla-do, where her parents work in the fish market. As it was for Le Clézio, the city is for Bitna an unfamiliar, crowded, and lonely place. By chance, Bitna gets a part-time job telling stories to Salome, a woman with an incurable illness who now spends her days at home, waiting to die. Bitna’s stories open up a world of adventure for both Bitna and Salome.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Seoul Selection
• Release date: Jan 11, 2018
• ISBN: 9781624121074

J.M.G. Le Clézio

J.M.G. Le Clézio, winner of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Literature, was born in Nice in 1940 and is one of France’s best-known contemporary writers. He has written more than 40 fiction and nonfiction books, including works for children. His works are translated into 36 languages around the world. He currently divides his time between Albuquerque, New Mexico, Mauritius, and his house on the sea in Brittany, France.

Book preview

The first story I told Salome

April 2016

In the spring, when the buds begin to open and the wind blows, longing for flowers, Mr. Cho Hansu carries the cages holding his pigeons up onto the roof. Mr. Cho has the right to do that because he’s the janitor, and the only one with the key. The building is a large apartment block from the 1980s, part of a multi-block complex called, goodness knows why, Good Luck! (complete with an exclamation mark), maybe because it’s so far from any hope of fortune or happiness. It is devoid of any style, with thousands of identical windows and hundreds of small glazed balconies where tenants hang their washing to dry in the pale sunshine that passes through. The number 19 is painted in black on the side wall of Mr. Cho’s building. There are eighteen others, all similar, but number 19 is the best, at the top of the hill above Yongsan. From the roof, on the twentieth floor, Mr. Cho can look out across the city, its great cement office blocks emerging from the mist.

In the spring, the sun is already hot, and the pigeons in their cages are excited by the warm wind, by the odors that rise from the branches of the pine trees all around. They coo and jostle. They stretch their necks to try to see outside. They forget about the wire netting nailed to the sides of the cages. Some people remark at the sight, Pigeons are the stupidest creatures in all of nature! They point out that the birds are trying to escape through holes so small that only half of their beaks fit. Just look at the size of their brains, they say. Mr. Cho has tried once or twice to contradict them: But they fly. Can you imagine what it is to fly? Isn’t that better than driving a car or filling in a sudoku? Everyone, including neighbors, other residents, and even caretakers of the other buildings, know about Mr. Cho’s obsession with his pigeons.

During the winter, the pigeons and Mr. Cho all sink into a sort of idle lethargy. Mr. Cho has an agreement with the building administrator, to act as janitor of the building but without receiving any salary. In exchange, he’s allowed to keep his homing pigeons with him and take them up onto the wide, flat roof to get some air. But you must be careful that the birds don’t make a mess, and you must not take them up in the elevator! Mr. Cho agrees. Of course, the administrator is doing him a favor, because Mr. Cho was a former policeman, and it’s always useful to have a policeman around. Mr. Cho has been the janitor of block 19 for five years, but before that he lived in the countryside in Ganghwado Island, in a village close to North Korea. He grew up in that village. His mother crossed through the fighting carrying him on her back and headed southward. She finally settled in Ganghwado Island, growing onions and potatoes, first as a worker, then after remarrying with the owner of the farm. When Mr. Cho was growing up, there was no longer war, but neither was there peace. There were soldiers everywhere, the roads were only used by tanks and trucks, and there was an American base nearby.

All Mr. Cho knows about the home of his mother, his grandparents, and his father is the name, Gaeseong. His grandfather, about whom his mother sometimes told him, was a very handsome man, very brown-skinned, with a lot of hair, a singer of pansori. He was also the owner of a pear plantation through his wife. A rich man, his mother had said, authoritarian but generous.

What happened to him after the war?

Oh, he’s been dead for a long time, and now there’s no one who remembers him on this side of the border.

Except Mr. Cho, because he remembers everything his mother told him. When she died, she carried away all those memories with her. Mr. Cho’s love of pigeons is something he owes to his mother. When she crossed the combat zone, she took with her a couple of homing pigeons her father had brought up. With the young Mr. Cho on her back, she carried the birds in a small bag pierced with holes so that they could breathe. She took them so that one day they might fly back to their native land, bringing news to her family on the other side. But time passed and Mr. Cho’s mother did not have the heart to send the pigeons back, so they went on living on this side of the frontier, grew old, and died. But in the meantime, they had many children, and these are the pigeons that Mr. Cho has brought up, with the thought that perhaps one day they might accomplish their intended mission. He hasn’t spoken of it to anybody, though, for who would believe that birds might retain the memory of their country of origin up to the third or fourth generation?

It’s morning. There is no better time for the pigeons. Mr. Cho has carried up five cages, one after another. In each cage are two pairs of pigeons, separated by a strong cardboard partition. Each couple share a name, a sort of surname, and each individual bird has a first name. This may seem meaningless. Mrs. Li, Mr. Cho’s neighbor, remarked to him one day, Why do you give names to those birds? Do pigeons know their names? They aren’t dogs, after all!

Mr. Cho looked at her reproachfully. But they know their names, madam. They’re much smarter than your dog, if you want my opinion.

Mrs. Li could not accept that. She liked contradicting people, and she was happy that for once Mr. Cho had responded to her.

That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve heard in a long time, she said. What do your pigeons have on my dog?

They fly, madam, said Mr. Cho.

The reply was categorical, and it left Mrs. Li stumped. Later, she thought, Why, I should have told him that flying is not a sign of intelligence and if Frog—this was the name of her dog, because he was small, short-legged, and plumpish, and croaked like a frog rather than a dog—had wings, he’d be able to fly, too.

So on this spring morning, Mr. Cho carries his five cages all the way up to the roof. He doesn’t take the elevator, because as janitor he respects his agreement with the administrator not to bring pigeon cages into the elevator. Otherwise, he might receive a reprimand from the bank that owns the building, reported by a malicious inhabitant claiming to be allergic to bird feathers. That would degenerate into a quarrel, and Mr. Cho doesn’t like quarrels.

Mr. Cho arrives on the roof panting, because he has climbed up the twenty floors five times, all the way up to the roof. He calculates this to be about 400 steps each time, which means 2,000 steps for the entire trip. Mr. Cho is no longer young. After thirty years of service in the police, he is long past retirement, and he can feel in his legs and in his lungs that he’s no longer twenty, or even thirty-five. So, once up on the roof, he grants himself a little respite, sitting on top of a ventilation shaft, looking out at the landscape of the city as it slowly emerges from the morning mist. In a few moments, he will clearly see Namsan Mountain and the spire of the radio tower, and a little beyond that the great shining serpent of the Hangang River with, a bit further on, the silhouettes of the skyscrapers of Gangnam and the ribbons of the highways. It’s a Sunday morning, still early, and the noise of the town is diminished, as if everyone is holding their breath for what is to follow.

And then it is time. The pigeons wait for him with growing impatience. They turn on themselves in the narrow space of the cages, they try to beat their wings, and their pinions emit a whistle that underlines their impatience. Mr. Cho feels this in his own body, like an electric fluid flowing along his limbs and escaping at the tips of his fingers, raising the little hairs on the backs of his hands. He crouches in front of the cages. He speaks to the birds, pronouncing their names slowly, one by one:

Vixen, and you, the male, Finch

Blue, and you, Robin

Rocket, White Arrow

Light, Moon

Fly, Cicada

Traveling Girl, President

Acrobat, Snail

Diamond, Black Dragon

Singer, King

Dancer, Saber

He says their names, his face close to the cages, one by one. Each time, the bird named stops fidgeting, turns its head backward, and looks up with its yellow eyes. And Mr. Cho feels as if he has received a confidence, a word of thanks and also a promise. A promise of what? He can’t say, but that’s how it feels, something uniting itself with him, giving him a memory of the past, something like a dream that continues on again after days of sleep.

It is time. Mr. Cho opens a long tin box, rather like a schoolboy’s pencil case. Inside are a series of messages that he has prepared, written by hand very neatly on fine, almost translucent rice paper. He imagined them for a long time before writing them. He didn’t want to write just anything. He didn’t simply want to enjoy himself, even though his daughter Sumi teased him, saying, So, Dad, are you writing to your sweetheart? Or Don’t forget to include your phone number! She, of course, doesn’t believe in it. It wasn’t part of her generation, nor even of the generation of the elderly folk who live in the same building. They live in their time. They make fun of Mr. Cho’s imaginings. They have the Internet, they write on their mobile phones, on their screens, using text messaging. It has been a long time since they have written any letters by hand. Yet Sumi, only a few years ago, still liked to write letters. Mr. Cho remembers that she even composed small poems for him to roll like cigarettes and put in the capsules hanging from the legs of the pigeons. And then she lost interest. When they moved into this building, in the center of this very large city, she stopped believing in the pigeons and their messages, and became like everyone

Reviews for Bitna

[marianro · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This novel is a declaration of love for all the people who cherish words in all their dimensions. Bitna, the protagonist, is an 18-year-old girl who leaves her rural town to go to Seoul to study. She has the misfortune of stopping at her aunt's house where, at first, it seems they are doing her a favor, but later the true intention is revealed: to take care of her cousin. After classes, she seeks refuge in a bookstore where she only observes the books because she cannot buy them. She becomes friends with the seller and they maintain a sentimental relationship that has nothing to do with a fairy tale. This man offers her a rather peculiar job: to tell stories to a woman who is bedridden. Every time Bitna wanders through Seoul, she invents stories about the people she sees, giving them names and sketching out lives for them like a script. The stories she tells Salomé range from reality to imagination, crossing such a subtle line that it is impossible to know what is true and what is not. As she tells Salomé, "Even the truth can be a lie if you don't believe it, and even a lie can be the truth if I tell it well." Such are the stories that Bitna weaves together in each encounter with the sick woman. The main theme is perhaps loneliness, how it is lived in big cities surrounded by people but still feeling alone. In the relationship between Bitna and Salomé, there is a duality expressed more by the storyteller. The narrative varies according to her mood and aims to provoke feelings in the patient, sometimes from cruelty and other times from love. A charming novel, with a wonderful character. And thus Salomé is nourished by the tales of others' lives, experiencing the world through Bitna's eyes. Sad, melancholic, and wonderful for those of us who love books and stories. (Translated from Spanish)

[veroausten · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is the first book I read by the French Nobel laureate, Jean-Marie Le Clézio. The protagonist of the story, Bitna, is a provincial Korean girl who moves to the city of Seoul to study at university. The city is unkind to her, but her imagination saves her and makes her resilient. Bitna has no friends or resources, but she manages to get a strange job as a storyteller for a rich, dying woman, and in her stories and characters, she mixes narratives from her own life. Each story is a tale, but at the same time, it is poetry. The whole book is both a fable and a great poem at once. (Translated from Spanish)

[Pamela Murphy · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

How eager I was to read a book by a Nobel Prize-winning author! And with this book, J.M.G. Le Clézio has turned what was once a desire into what will become a habit. For a while, I wanted to step out of my comfort zone in terms of literature; I wanted to discover new authors and explore genres unfamiliar to me, so when the opportunity to read this book arose, I didn't hesitate for a moment. Besides the synopsis that captivated me instantly, this is one of those books that makes you fall in love with it through its cover, which, at first glance, enchanted me with its beauty based on simplicity. And so it was with these ideas in mind that I immersed myself in the reading of Bitna Under the Sky of Seoul. A reading that managed to bring me to tears within its first pages, as it revived for me memories of my days in the reading circle of my city—those days when we read short stories and shared our opinions surrounded by books and coffee. Through the pages, Le Clézio tells the story of Bitna, an 18-year-old girl who leaves her life in the province of Jeolla-do driven by her parents' desire for her to attend a good university in the city. Upon arriving in the city, Bitna stays at her aunt's house, believing it will be a pleasant stay surrounded by family, but things soon take a turn for Bitna. The constant demands of her aunt and cousin quickly force her to seek a new place to live. To distract herself from the problems of daily life, Bitna takes refuge in the city’s bookstore, spending her days reading stories in books she cannot afford to buy, but which, without her knowing yet, will change her life. It is in this bookstore that a job offer comes into her hands: the chance to earn money telling stories to Salome, a sick woman condemned to live her last days tied to a wheelchair and immersed in pain. It was at this point that I knew this book would leave a significant mark on my reader's heart. Here, I felt very connected to the story, first because, like Bitna, books have been a distraction from the problems of daily life for me, and second because upon reading the job opportunity that presented itself to Bitna, I couldn't help but feel a healthy envy: what good reader wouldn't want to earn money doing what they are most passionate about in life? And just after that job offer, what I consider the jewel of this book begins: the stories Bitna tells Salome—narratives that transported me to various places, from traveling alongside Mr. Cho’s pigeons to walking on the rainbow bridge. For me, reading this book felt like reading five; I loved the way the author placed various stories into one, subtly linking one to another, and above all, I adored the reason for so many stories: to make Salome’s last days the best of her life through reading. Because let’s face it, we’ve all felt like Salome at some point, tied to something, hoping our passion for books would set us free. The simplicity of the beauty of the stories narrated for Salome only enriches the reading experience—short yet fluid tales that invited me to turn one more page, one more sheet, until I finished the book in the blink of an eye, surrounded by all the wonderful feelings this reading awakened in me. No story resembles another; they all have their own essence, and it is that variety that adds its own shine to each part of the book, turning it into one of the most treasured jewels on my bookshelf. In conclusion, a light yet enriching book, capable of awakening a great variety of emotions and sensations, and, above all, capable of igniting in the reader the ability to put themselves in the characters' shoes—from becoming a storyteller of incredible tales like Bitna to becoming a Salome who enjoys and appreciates the different worlds in which a great story immerses us. And if anyone were to ask me if this book is a suitable choice to step out of our comfort zone regarding readings and genres, my answer would always be: OF COURSE IT IS! This is my opinion, but as I always say: read the book, judge for yourselves, and leave me your opinion in a comment. You know I’m always eager to read it. (Translated from Spanish)