→ November 20, 2025
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We Do Not Part.

Han Kang won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature in part for her 2021 novel We Do Not Part, which appeared earlier this year in English translation for the first time. This exploration of one of the darkest moments in modern Korean – and American – history works through a struggling female protagonist, somewhat similar to the lead character of her novel The Vegetarian, who finds herself called to the hospital bedside of a friend with whom she was once collaborating on a project about the Cheju genocide. This call leads to a visit to the sick friend’s house, where the lines between reality and dream start to bend, and it’s unclear whose memories we’re reading or how legitimate they are.

Kyungha is a writer who is deeply isolated and almost certainly depressed, often forgetting to eat, sometimes lying for hours on her apartment floor to escape the oppressive heat of the city’s summers. When she sleeps, she’s plagued by nightmares related to the massacres at Cheju, which inspired a scene in her latest, unfinished novel. She gets a call from Inseon, with whom she’d worked on a documentary of sorts about the same killings; Inseon is injured and will be stuck in the hospital for weeks, so she asks Kyungha to go to her house to feed her bird Ama. Once there, however, Kyungha gets stuck in the house without power due to a blizzard, and she begins hallucinating, or perhaps she has died and is experiencing something paranormal, with the result that she ends up hearing the history of Inseon’s family during the massacres.

Cheju (or Jeju) Island is located south of the Korean peninsula and currently has over 600,000 people living there. The residents of the island had begun protesting the planned election in the southern half of Korea, controlled by the United States at the time, because they believed it would lead to a permanent partition. In 1948, the communist party on the island organized a general strike, which turned into an armed insurgency. The strongman Syngman Rhee, the first President of the Republic of Korea, responded with brutal force, with the full backing and consent of the United States, killing somewhere between 15,000 and 100,000 people on the island. The Korean army forces killed children and babies and gang-raped women and girls. Tens of thousands of others were imprisoned for their alleged roles in the insurgency. After the massacre, it was illegal to even mention the government’s actions on Cheju until 1990, and South Korea didn’t hold a truth & reconciliation commission until 2003, when the government finally admitted they had committed genocide against the people of Cheju. (For more on the history of the Cheju genocide, the Wikipedia article is superb, as is this 2000 story from Newsweek.)

We Do Not Part deals with such heavy material that it’s hard to call it a “light” read, but Kang is such a strong prose writer – and some of this may be a credit to the translators, e. yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris – that it is an incredibly compelling, accessible read, even for someone (like me, before I read the book) with zero knowledge of the history involved. The first half of the book reads quite a bit like Kang’s novel The Vegetarian, with the protagonist’s alienation permeating all aspects of the narrative, while the second half veers almost into magical realism. As Inseon and her mother retell the histories of Inseon’s father and uncle from the time of the genocide, including witnessing massacres of civilians, Kang’s technique and prose give them a hazy quality to emphasize that these are ghosts or spirits or even Kyungha’s subconscious relating these stories.

I’ve been sitting on this post for four days now, and I think I’m just stuck on this one. I loved this book, but I also know this book has way more going on than I understood or appreciated. I’m not Korean and I didn’t know a single thing about the Jeju genocide until I read it and went to Wikipedia to figure out what I was missing. I’ll just stop here and say the book is fantastic, and I would recommend this even before The Vegetarian.

—

In 2021, LitHub published a list of the 50 best classic novels under 200 pages, which included several titles I’d already read and enjoyed, so I copied the list into a Google sheet and started reading my way through it – often just reading whatever I found in bookstores on my travels. I grabbed Clarice Lispector’s Near to the Wild Heart at Changing Hands last month, since it’s on the list and takes its title from the same James Joyce quote that Japandroids used for their best album. It got the better of me; I did finish it, but I struggled because nothing happens in the novel. It presents the inner monologue of Joana, flashing back to her childhood and her present marriage to her faithless husband Otávio, with the sort of disjointed sentence structure of Joyce or Alfred Döblin or Virginia Woolf, all of whom I have found difficult to read. This one just wasn’t for me.

Christopher Isherwood’s A Single Man also comes from the LitHub list; he’s better known now for his Berlin Stories, which inspired the musical Cabaret, but this is a more serious novel and seems like it was considered his best work during his lifetime. The title character is George Falconer, a gay man whose partner Jim has recently died. George is British and now lives in California, in the house he shared with Jim and some pets he seems to have gotten rid of after Jim’s death, teaching at a local university and trying to find new meaning in his relationships with other people. The story moves in fits and starts, but picks up towards the end with two much more meaningful conversations, before the slightly ambiguous ending (I think it’s real, but I see online some people believe it’s a what-if). Falconer is a flawed character, pretentious at times, mopey at others, probably just not a very nice guy, but still makes for an interesting study. I can’t find an answer to this, but I wonder if John Cheever was paying homage to A Single Man in his novel Falconer, another influential gay novel that came out about 16 years after this one. The dialogue here can get a little stilted, but it seems to be in service of making George’s awkwardness in social situations – but not in terms of his own sexuality – clearer on the page.

Next up: Susan Orlean’s The Library Book.

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→ May 15, 2025
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The Vegetarian.

Han Kang won the first Booker International Prize given to a single work of fiction for her novel The Vegetarian, and in 2024 she won the Nobel Prize in Literature for her entire body of work, much of which is still unavailable in English. The Vegetarian is a shocking novel in many ways, not least of which is how the title character, who is assaulted in multiple ways for deciding on a simple act of bodily autonomy, never gets to tell us her perspective.

The Vegetarian has three parts, each of which is told from the perspective of someone close to Yeong-hye, a housewife in Seoul who has violent dreams about animals and decides to stop eating meat. Her husband, whose perspective we get in the first section, is bewildered and incensed; he found his wife to be boring and “completely unremarkable in every way,” and so this remarkable choice leads him to arrange an intervention that includes her sister, brother-in-law, and parents. The intervention ends in violence of one sort, leading into the second part, told from her brother-in-law’s perspective, which ends in violence of a different sort, before we get the perspective of her sister, who is the only person in Yeong-hye’s life who seems to care even one iota about whether she lives or dies.

While there are multiple shocking scenes in The Vegetarian, including sexual and physical assault and a suicide attempt, the manner in which Kang tells the story is so anodyne that these incidents appear to come out of nowhere. It is the ultimate “that escalated quickly” novel, where an ordinary situation spirals out of control within a page, and the settings of these jarring events – on gray days, in industrial apartments – just make them seem that much more out of place.

Where I struggled with The Vegetarian was less in its violence or shocking nature than in figuring out what the ultimate point was. Giving up meat is a common choice, for ethical, health, financial, or religious reasons; it is actually the most normal thing Yeong-hye does in the novel. What she does beyond that, including almost completely stopping speaking to anyone around her, is harder and harder to understand. She doesn’t want to die, but she doesn’t not want to die, even asking “why is it such a bad thing to die?” – twice, in fact, although the way in which she asks it varies subtly in a way I won’t spoil.

Is this, then, a story about death as an escape from intolerable conditions? Yeong-hye is technically free, but lacks freedom. She has no real agency in her own life, except for what she chooses to take into her own body – and even that decision to assert one fundamental bit of autonomy elicits furious, violent responses from her immediate family. She has no job, and thus no money of her own. Where she lives and what she does during the day is largely if not entirely dictated by her husband. Her consent to sex is not required in her husband’s view. After their marriage dissolves, ostensibly because she chose to stop eating meat (which, to her husband, means she’s gone crazy), she endures different assaults on her physical and personal autonomy, which seems to drive her further inward, reducing her interactions with and dependence on the outside world. When her sister visits her in the psychiatric ward where she is staying in the final third of the book – even though she seems far less disturbed than the other patients we glimpse – it’s as if she has decided to leave the physical plane, not to die, but to shed the parts of herself she can’t control. I’ve seen reviews referring to it as a satire or commentary on misogyny in South Korean culture as well, but knowing nothing of that topic, I didn’t see that in my reading.

That’s a long way of saying I respect and appreciate The Vegetarian, but couldn’t entirely connect with it, either. It’s challenging in multiple ways, some of which is very good – Kang’s intent doesn’t leap off the page, certainly, and that results in a book that, if nothing else, made me think about it long after I was done.

(Also, every time I say or think the title of this book, I hear Skoob saying, “no Parks sausages, mom, please!”)

Next up: I just finished Stacey Levine’s Mice 1961 and started Percival Everett’s I Am Not Sidney Poitier.

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→ June 22, 2022
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Lemon.

Kwon Yeo-Sun’s novella Lemon made a slew of best-of lists last year, from most-anticipated to top novels of 2021, for its unusual, incisive treatment of what might otherwise have been an ordinary murder mystery. Set in 2002, as the World Cup that took place in South Korea and Japan was coming to a close, Lemon examines the brutal murder of a beautiful high school student and the impact it had on her family, friends, the suspects, and others, while only partially unwrapping the mystery of who actually killed her.

Written through the perspective of three women who knew the victim, Hae-on, Lemon defies the conventions of the modern literary mystery, where a murder or other horrific crime defines the story’s structure and its solution must inform the ending of the book. Da-on is Hae-on’s younger sister, but was the more worldly of the two, often taking care of Hae-on when the older girl seemed ill-equipped to handle reality, forgetting even the most basic personal tasks; after Hae-on’s death, Da-on reacts in increasingly hysterical ways, including undergoing plastic surgery to try to resemble her dead sister. Taerim is the girlfriend of one of the two main suspects in the murder, and her sections are written as her halves of conversations with a suicide prevention line and a psychiatrist, and it becomes clear that she knows more than she has let on. She marries that suspect in question, but their life is shattered by a subsequent tragedy with a subtle connection to the original murder. Sanghui was a new student and classmate of Hae-on and plays the part of the demos from Greek tragedies, standing in for the audience (or the reader) and observing the story as a third party. Within all of these is the possible answer to the mystery, the obliquely described revenge plot Da-on takes on who she believes is the killer, and a powerful exploration of grief and the lack of meaning in this senseless death.

Kwon has won multiple literary awards in her native Korea, but this is her first work to be translated into English, which may explain some of the rapturous praise for Lemon – it’s our first exposure to her voice and style, even though she’s been publishing works in Korean for more than a quarter-century. She weaves poetry into the story, and her prose writing often has the metaphorical quality of poetry, with descriptions that leave the reader feeling like they’re looking at the story from an angle that leaves it shrouded in mist. There are recurring images and symbols, including the lemons of the title, and frequent mention of the color yellow, such as the dress the victim was supposedly wearing on the night of her murder, and meditative passages on appearance and identity or the meaning (or lack thereof) of life.

What the book doesn’t do, and what might frustrate a lot of readers, is give you a clear answer to the murder. The first chapter of the novella’s eight, each of which takes place in a different year, sets up what appears to be the plot of a literary mystery, with a police interrogation of one of those two suspects where the cop tries to coerce a confession, but Kwon defies any of those expectations afterwards. You just have to go with it, and what I believe is the answer is buried within other text without anything definitive, so you might miss it and you certainly don’t get the Big Confession that modern book culture has led us to expect. It’s a good ride because it challenges your reading mind, but if you need clear and unequivocal answers, it’s going to leave you frustrated.

Next up: I just finished Alan Hollinghurst’s Booker Prize-winning book The Line of Beauty.

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→ August 20, 2018
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Pachinko.

Min Jin Lee’s second novel, Pachinko, earned broad acclaim last year, including a spot on the shortlist for the National Book Award (which it lost to Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing) and on the New York Times‘ list of the ten best books of last year, all of which brought it to my attention in the spring when I was looking at potential winners of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, which went to the markedly inferior Less. Lee’s novel manages to combine a totally unfamiliar aspect of world history and culture – the outsider status of Koreans living in Japan during and after the latter’s colonization of the Korean peninsula – with the familiar epic structure of classic novels of the British tradition. If Dickens or Eliot had written a novel about Koreans living as part of the underclass in Japan, it would probably look a lot like Pachinko.

Pachinko is a type of arcade game very popular in Japan, similar to pinball, and often used for gambling. Pachinko parlors are mostly owned by Koreans, and it was one of the few industries open to ethnic Koreans in Japan in the wake of colonization, which Lee uses as the backdrop for her novel. The book covers four generations of a Korean family from their beginnings in Busan, a city at the southern tip of the peninsula, through their settlement in Yokohama, Japan, and multiple tragedies borne largely of the disadvantages and obstacles they face as permanent outsiders in their adopted homeland.

The novel moves quickly to get us to Sunja, a teenaged Korean daughter of a widowed innkeeper, when she becomes pregnant by a Korean man, Honsu, who lives in Japan and only later reveals that he has a wife and children in Osaka whom he won’t leave or divorce. Sunja marries a Korean Presbyterian missionary, who moves her to Japan, where the family faces ongoing discrimination that moves from the overt to the subtle over the course of the novel’s fifty-odd years, where even educational achievement isn’t enough to push her descendants past the invisible barriers of anti-Korean prejudice in Japanese society. The source of Hansu’s wealth and power isn’t revealed until later in the book, but even his influence can’t break down all of these walls, and the pachinko industry becomes the source of refuge and only path to wealth or success for several members of the family. Through the narrative, Lee works in the mistreatment of Koreans prior to and during World War II, including political prisoners and forced laborers as well as off-screen references to “comfort women,” before the tone shifts to one of superficial acceptance and tacit discrimination in the wake of the war.

The overarching theme of Pachinko is one of displacement, as some of the core characters still yearn to return to Korea, thinking of it as home, while others want to think of Japan as home – especially Sunja’s younger son and grandson, both born in the archipelago – but aren’t fully accepted by Japanese society. Koreans in the novel form a cultural enclave, surrounded by Japanese people and their economic and social hierarchies, unable to fully assimilate even if they learn the language fluently and attend Japanese schools. Any upward mobility is stunted by formal and informal obstacles, like a plant trying to grow into ground that is too hard for its roots to penetrate. This leads to a sense of anomie in some characters, like Sunja’s younger son Mozasu, who ends up in the pachinko business primarily because it’s that or jail, while others, like her son with Hansu, Noa, can never reconcile their two identities and come to awful ends.

Although female agency is another theme that looms large throughout the novel, Noa seems to best encapsulate Lee’s points about identity and isolation. He’s an ethnic Korean, but grows up believing his adoptive father, the Presbyterian missionary, is his biological father, and finds out far later that his real father is the businessman of dubious methods, Hansu, destroying any sense of self he’d built up through his own hard work in school and in jobs where he’s underpaid because he’s Korean. Lee writes more from the perspectives of the women in the novel, mostly Sunja, but Noa’s story after the revelation about his parentage could have used even more elucidation, as he disappears from the novel for many years of book time, leaving me with questions about the continued effects of his mixed-up identity.

I ended up getting Pachinko as a digital loan from my library after putting in a hold back in February, and when the book showed up, I was in the middle of something else, and had just eight days to finish it before the loan expired, which would be aggressive for a book of over 450 pages … but it reads so quickly that I finished it in four days. Lee’s prose absolutely flies, even with plenty of descriptive, scene-setting language, and the book is largely driven by dialogue, so the pace rarely slows. I have other, minor quibbles, such as wishing for more depth on certain characters, but Pachinko is so ambitious and exposes a world that was totally opaque or outright unknown to me beforehand that it seems petty to dwell on them. I would still rank it below Lincoln in the Bardo among 2017 novels, but it was more than worthy of any of the annual fiction awards for which it was considered.

Next up: Another 2017 novel, Alice McDermott’s The Ninth Hour.

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