There is something unsettling about Son Bo-mi’s short story collection Swell. The South Korean writer’s stories are often grounded in ordinary experiences – travel, relationships, chance encounters – but they rarely remain stable for long. Instead, a sense of uncertainty slowly builds that leaves both characters and readers slightly off balance.
Across the collection, stories begin in familiar, realistic settings before shifting and destabilising as they intertwine. Characters reappear, but their histories are altered; alternate timelines open up, and perspectives are filtered through storytellers and other intermediaries. Individually, the stories feel grounded and intimate, yet taken together a more fragmented and uncanny structure emerges.
Like an optical illusion, Swell offers two ways of reading the same material. On one level, it depicts contemporary lives with sensitivity and realism; on another, it reveals a strange underlying logic where stories loop, shift, and overlap in unexpected ways. This sense of duality is what makes Swell particularly compelling.
Son also explores questions of self-perception and self-delusion. The short stories expose the ways in which people shape and distort their own narratives. This results in a collection that feels both familiar and strangely unstable, as though something is always just out of reach. And Janet Hong’s translation keeps the prose sharp and understated, letting the book’s oddness emerge naturally.
