2025 Reading–January

The Vegetarian by Han Kang

The Vegetarian by Han Kang. I was asked to moderate a discussion of this book in February, so I needed to reread it. It comprises three linked novellas narrated by three different people but focused on a young woman who undergoes a deepening mental break down. It begins with her deciding, after a gruesome dream, to become a vegetarian, a decision that meets with resistance from her husband and her family. The second novella, her sister’s husband becomes obsessed with her and asks her to be a model in the piece of video art he has conceived, which pushes her further toward the edge. And in the last section, she’s in a mental hospital and is visited regularly by her sister, but she steadily gets worse. It’s a powerful, but very dark, story about violence and subservience.

Greek Lessons by Han Kang is another novel by the Nobel Prize winner. It disappoints in some ways. The two main characters are a woman who can’t speak (for, apparently, psychological reasons) and a man whose eyesight is failing. The woman is taking lessons in ancient Greek from the man because she hopes that the vastly different language (Korean is her mother tongue) will jog her power of speech loose, as it had once before when she studied French. The man, also Korean, was taken to Germany by his family when he was 15 and studied Greek and Greek philosophy there, but he’s come back to Korea as an adult in part because of his vision. I do wish the author spent more time on setting, as Seoul is basically invisible to the reader. There is an interesting exploration of language and the senses, but it all feels very cold.

The White Book by Han Kang is a short volume that is called a novel, but to me it’s something else. A meditation on white things, it is apparently an autobiographical reflection on the brief life of Han’s sister, who was born prematurely and died within hours. The language is lyrical and the subject moving, but as a novel it’s unsatisfying.

The Magic Kingdom by Russell Banks was published not long before Banks’s death. The conceit here is that Harley Mann, an elderly real estate broker, is speaking his story into a tape recorder (and given that I listened to the audiobook, that seemed perfectly natural). Mann was a boy when he and his mother and siblings came to live at the New Bethany Shaker plantation in Florida. I knew very little about the Shakers, so much of the history of that Christian sect was new to me, and I found it fascinating. This group lived on 7,000 acres and did all manner of agricultural work to grow food in order to feed themselves and to sell to earn the funds to sustain the colony. It quickly develops in the telling that Mann became infatuated as a teen with a woman several years his elder, and what we hear is largely about their relationship.

On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder is a short book subtitled “Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century,” and I read it because last month I read a longer work by the author, On Freedom, and wanted more. Published in 2017, it anticipates the horror-show that the first Trump administration became and that the second one promises to be. The “lessons” are helpful tips for surviving an authoritarian regime.

O Monstrous World! By Josh Woods is a collection of quirky stories. There’s some horror and some supernatural events here and a good bit of humor thrown in.

Tremor by Teju Cole is a novel about a photographer who teaches at Harvard. Much of the book reads as a discourse on art and music, with themes that showcase the white mistreatment of African cultures. Inside the polemic there is an interesting character, one who is married to a Japanese-American woman but who also once had an affair with a man, and also had a very close friendship with another man. He loves African music and on a trip to Nigeria makes regular visits to a night club to hear music. In the middle of this relatively short book is a 50-page chapter that consists of vignettes in the voices of residents of Lagos. It’s unclear to me what the point of this chapter is. Overall, it’s disappointing as a novel, but I’m intrigued by the main character.

About the author

I am the author of three novels--THE LAST BIRD OF PARADISE, OLIVER'S TRAVELS, and THE SHAMAN OF TURTLE VALLEY--and three story collections--IN AN UNCHARTED COUNTRY, HOUSE OF THE ANCIENTS AND OTHER STORIES, and WHAT THE ZHANG BOYS KNOW, winner of the Library of Virginia Literary Award for Fiction. I am also the co-founder and former editor of Prime Number Magazine and the editor of the award-winning anthology series EVERYWHERE STORIES: SHORT FICTION FROM A SMALL PLANET.

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