The back of a being that suddenly stopped walking
The photos of 'Buba' that elevate the insignificant moments into art
The writings of the French representative intellectual 'Tournier' were encountered
The masterpiece essay "Back View" has been revised and published after 20 years.

Michel Tournier's essay "Back View," published in Korea in 2002 and loved for nearly 20 years, has returned with an even more complete translation.
Tournier, who was considered one of France's greatest writers and a representative intellectual of Europe, had published masterpieces such as 『Vandredi, the End of the Pacific』 and 『The Devil』, as well as prose collections such as 『Short Writings, Long Silences』, 『Praise』, and 『Diary of Disappearance』 until his passing in 2016. This book, published together with Edouard Boubat, who occupies an important peak in the history of photography, is a fascinating work that Professor Kim Hwa-young, the translator, discovered in a second-hand bookstore in Paris and immediately read in one sitting, deciding to translate.
In this revised edition, not only have we meticulously corrected errors in previous translations, but we have also meticulously refined every word and every sentence to reflect the times, ensuring that even young readers encountering Tournier's work for the first time can fully appreciate the nuances and charm of his writing.


People express themselves by decorating their faces, making facial expressions, moving their hands, making gestures, and using their body language and footsteps.
It's all on full display.
So what about the other side? The back? The back of the back? The back doesn't lie.

It is precisely the truth behind that that this little book seeks to explore.
_In the text

Pictures sometimes tell a story better than words.
By freezing the ever-changing reality for a moment, it makes the familiar scenery unfamiliar and makes us imagine the story hidden behind the image.
Photography is clearly a completely new and powerful form of language developed by humans.
This book contains over 50 black-and-white photographs by Edouard Boubat that capture the 'back side' of people and the world, including a farmer carrying a plow with a gaunt body, a middle-aged woman painting alone on a desolate beach, believers kneeling in prayer, a poor couple looking at the waves, a mother holding a child in her arms, a young angel who is so curious about what's beyond the shoulders of tall adults, a stooped old man walking with a cane, and the streets of Paris filled with trash.
And Michel Tournier, with his masterful imagination and profound insight, draws out intimate stories from each photograph and conveys them to the reader in rich poetic language.


The back story this book shows is honest.
Simple and plain.
It's lonely, but infinitely beautiful.
Buba and Tournier reflect on life, humanity, love and friendship, faith and the universe and communicate with each other through the 'back view' reflected in the camera lens.
And he concludes that the truth of the world is not in the front that can be adorned with lies, but in the back, and that through the back, we can reach the deep inner self.
Reborn with a new translation, "Back View" will, as it has done for the past 20 years, bring the joy of viewing beautiful photographs and text to new readers in a new era, as well as the profound joy of peering into the depths of humanity, life, the world, and society.

Now, we are shaking off the dust of time that has settled on this book and offering a completely new translation of Tournier's wise and beautiful text to a new audience.
The writer Michel Tournier, whom I often visited in Choiseul, a small village near Paris, for about ten years before and after the first publication of this book, passed away four years ago in 2016.
Now, his once kind and humorous smiling face has become a 'back view'.
_Dedicated to the new translation of the 2020 edition