Toward Eternity

DEBUT Hur, often award-nominated for his enthralling translations from Korean, crafts his own novel that is intensely focused on the power of language. It begins with a disappearance. New technology can replace human cells with nanites, saving people from life threatening diseases and, potentially, granting immortality. The second person to undergo this nanodroid process lives for decades, until the day he vanishes between one step and the next. A scientist who’s intimately tied to this research begins to investigate, hiding her observations in a notebook. From then on, the characters skip across countless years, recording stories of their conflicts with technology, identity, and poetry as they pass the notebook along. Their struggles coalesce into a moving, philosophical exploration of what it means to be alive. Hur asks whether the self can exist beyond biology and memory, whether souls can be made rather than born, and whether the most enduring part of humanity might be as ethereal a concept as love.