The Impossible Fairy Tale

“If you’re going to write about love, write it in pencil.” Such is the philosophy of the little girl named Mia, who receives 72 colored pencils at the beginning of South Korean writer Han Yujoo’s extremely strange novel. We’re told that Mia has both the power to kill and the power to save, that she has two fathers, and that the year is 1998; Mia’s world also seems to be contained inside the dream of one of her teachers. But whether in dream, reality, or in the scenes Mia fills with pictures and colorful secrets, she is pursued by her opposite, the sadistic and nameless Child, who murders animals and sabotages her classmates’ work, filling their assignments with threats and rumors. Where Mia uses art to create, the Child uses it to kill, and the two of them play a sinister game of cat and mouse in the classroom and in the mysterious Building 101, which exists both in the real world and in a fantasy hatched by a dreamer whose awakening brings yet another dimension into focus. The Impossible Fairy Tale occupies a destabilizing, often inscrutable terrain where “dreams without origin pass by” and “sleep recedes,” where “No sentence is clear. Or unclear.” This transfixing experimental novel questions where sleep ends and books begin, a concept borrowed from the works of French writer Maurice Blanchot, and the atmosphere of nightmarish dread and penetrating weirdness recalls a David Lynch film. (Mar.)