The Hole by Hye-Young Pyun

Source of book: Audiobook from the library

 

This book may have the weirdest backstory for how I decided to read it. As regular readers know, I make an effort to seek out books in translation. My wife and I go through the NPR books list every year together (over craft cocktails usually) and make notes about what we want to read. I also follow LitHub and the International Booker longlist for other ideas. 

 

Anyway, I had put The Hole by Hiroko Oyamada on my list - originally written in Japanese. I needed an audiobook, and checked out what was available on Libby. There was a waitlist for the Oyamada book, but none for another book of the same title: The Hole by Hye-Young Pyun, originally in Korean. 

 

The book sounded interesting, and it won the Shirley Jackson award. So, it was worth a shot. And that’s how I found this book. 

 

As the award might indicate, this book is at least arguably in the horror genre. Although it is a lot more than that. It gets dark, for sure, but it is mostly literary fiction, very internal and character driven. The horror unfolds gradually, until the final catastrophe. 

 

This is the third book I have read by Korean authors - all of them women. While each book has been quite different, one thing that seems to be a common thread is that Korean women, the authors at least, are not down with the patriarchy. They are straight up done with entitled men, the sexual double standard, the normalization of sexual assault, and gender roles. D. O. N. E. 

 

On a related note, South Korea ranks dead last in birth rates (ahead only of Hong Kong, which is technically a city and a part of China, not a country.) It also is the home of the “4B” movement. 

 

This is, perhaps predictable. A society that has progressed to modern technology, has a high education level, yet retains its sexist culture, is indeed likely to have difficulty persuading its women to procreate. 

 

This book perhaps illustrates some of that dynamic. 

 

The book is from the perspective of Oghi, a middle-aged professor, who has just survived a catastrophic car accident that killed his wife. Oghi is mostly paralyzed, and unable to speak. He can understand and write a little (and painfully), but few people take the time to understand him. 

 

His caretaker is his mother-in-law, which will perhaps become very important in the story. I hesitate to give away too many spoilers, so perhaps stop reading if you don’t want any. 

 

As the story unfolds, Oghi’s memory slowly returns, and we learn that not everything is as it seems. On the surface, Oghi has a great life. He has a stable job, some degree of respect from his colleagues and students, and a happy marriage. At one time, his dinner parties were legendary. The accident occurred on the way to a romantic getaway. 

 

But this isn’t the deeper truth about his life. Behind every success is a bit of darkness, as we - and Oghi - comes to realize. How much of this does his mother-in-law know? 

 

The book is non-linear in form. We start right after the accident, with Oghi in the hospital. The story of his life from then on is told in a linear story, but with flashbacks to various times in the past, and these are all over the place. How Oghi met his wife, his awkward meeting with her parents, the events leading up to the accident, Oghi’s career, and eventually the events that make the reader reconsider if Oghi is a good or a bad person. 

 

While we never hear directly from Oghi’s wife, we gradually come to understand her perspective. Her frustration at her lack of success in life, her jealousy, her invisibility to Oghi, and her threats to ruin him. 

 

Interestingly, Oghi is the only character with a name. His wife and mother-in-law are always described as that. Other characters likewise get descriptions by function, not names. His colleagues get initials only. Nearly everything takes place in Oghi’s head. 

 

And yet, is he really the center of the story? 

 

The book is also about isolation, and the problems faced by gravely disabled people - and it is disconcertingly accurate about how easy it is for a relative caretaker to isolate and neglect a disabled person without any checkup. Having worked in elder law for two and a half decades, I can say that while most relatives go above and beyond in their care, there are exceptions, and these tend to fall through the cracks in the system. Particularly if the person doesn’t have other family to make sure they are okay, which is the case in this book. 

 

One of the strong points of this book is that it doesn’t require anything out of the ordinary to create its horror. This is mundane, ordinary, everyday stuff. All it takes is a choice here or there, and this could happen to anyone. 

 

The questions we perhaps should be asking are interesting. How can we improve care for the disabled and prevent neglect from going unnoticed? How can we enable the disabled to better communicate, and how can we listen better? How does our societal tendency to shove caretaking off on women feed these problems?

 

And, for Oghi, we might wonder how to live our lives so that others have positive feelings about us rather than negative? 

 

This book is pretty short - just over 4 hours on the audiobook - but it makes the most of its length using spare yet elegant writing. It does more with less. 

 

The Hole will not be everyone’s cup of tea, but for a thoughtful horror story, with ambiguity and deeper questions, this is a good choice. 

 

Oh, and I guess I still need to read the other book by this name…