Han Kang

1 Comment December 31, 2020 Steve Wiggins

As has become traditional on this blog, I like to revisit my reading for the year before the next one begins. No matter what else goes wrong, we have books. As I noted yesterday, I’ll be devising my own reading challenge for the coming year and if nothing else, it’ll be diverse. For 2020, according to Goodreads, I finished 78 books. Since I was in the final stages of getting Nightmares with the Bible to the publisher, several books early on were about demons, and many of them were quite good. The nonfiction that really stick out in my mind, however, includes D. W. Pasulka’s American Cosmic, Richard King’s Ahab’s Rolling Sea, Gary D. Rhodes’ The Birth of the American Horror Film, Jeffrey J. Kripal’s Secret Body, Barbara Ehrenreich’s Living with a Wild God, and Ernestine Hayes’ The Tao of Raven. If anything ties these books together it is likely their honesty when it comes to the spiritual quest. It can legitimately take many directions.

Fiction has, at least for much of the year, been driven by a few factors: books I have on hand during a pandemic, The Modern Mrs. Darcy’s reading challenge, and books on my reading wishlist. That list is constantly growing and the books that stand out particularly are again diverse. Especially memorable were Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Hank Green’s An Absolutely Remarkable Thing, Han Kang’s The Vegetarian, Scott Shibuya Brown’s The Traders, Andrew Michael Hurley’s The Loney, and Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican Gothic. Apart from their diversity these books have little in common. I suppose that’s a testament to the importance of reading widely. On that list there are only two “white” men but a lot of great books.

Another couple of categories might apply: big books and short story collections. Big books intimidate me, but I read five of over 500 pages: Ellison’s Invisible Man again, Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, Mark Twain’s The Innocents Abroad, George Eliot’s Middlemarch (my longest book for the year), and Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho. These books are all in the “classics” category, I see. Short story collections are more edible, and I read nine of them, including four “by” Rod Serling. The first was an edited collection of his works, and the other three were his own Twilight Zone adaptations. I read a few plague books because of the pandemic, but they weren’t really among my favorites. Perhaps they were a little too close to reality. Nevertheless 2020 was a good year of reading, overall. I’m looking ahead to what gems 2021 might hold.

1 Comment May 24, 2020 Steve Wiggins

Some stories are unsettling to the point of spirituality. That’s my impression of Han Kang’s The Vegetarian. My wife wanted my opinion of it and when she used the adjective “Kafkaesque” I knew I had to comply. The comparison is eerie in that Franz Kafka essentially starved to death because no way could be found to feed him with his underlying medical condition. The Vegetarian shifts focus in its three parts, but the protagonist, Yeong-hye, is a young woman who finds her life run by other people in her family after she decides to become a vegetarian (in actual fact, a vegan). Basing her decision on disturbing dreams she has, those in her Korean culture cannot accept vegetarianism and attempt, by various forms of coercion, to change her decision. Throughout the account, Yeong-hye becomes silent—we’re never given her point of view—but those around her can’t accept her decision.

This is a challenging book to read, given my own personal history, but after scratching my head a bit when I finished it I came to reflect on this spiritual side of it. My own vegetarianism was an ethical decision. I realize that I can’t and shouldn’t impose my ethics on others, but I’ve not had much resistance from others (apart from colleagues who occasionally make reservations at eateries with no hint of the concept). Likewise, I became a vegan a few years back based on further reflection of an ethical kind. This is actually a spiritual practice. I don’t often express it in those terms, but clearly it is. In the novel when Yeong-hye’s brother-in-law tries to direct her life, he takes her to a Buddhist restaurant because he knows nowhere else to find vegetarian offerings.

Yeong-hye believes herself to be becoming a plant, and that leads to the next logical step in this progression of thinking. Eating is, or at least can be, a spiritual exercise. Many religions advocate fasts of various durations to derive the benefits to the soul. Daily life is a matter of routine for many, often based around our culturally driven mandate of three meals a day. I’m not alone at working through lunch while trying to get more done at my job. By the final meal of the day I find myself exhausted. It’s about more than food. This strange little book has put me into a reverie about the ethics of eating. I don’t know if Han Kang is a vegetarian or not, but she does understand the soul of one.