Tag Archives: fiction

Bookshelf – The Vegetarian, Han Kang

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It is a fortunate person who attains adulthood unscarred by the complications of childhood. Some scars are superficial. These fade with time. Others, though, cut deep and retain the heat of hurt. They inflame emotions and force the bearer to construct inner defenses needed to maintain outer control.

Yeong-hye is scathed in this way. As a girl, she survives a brutish father. As a woman, she marries a loutish man, who describes her “as completely unremarkable in every way.” Equally unexceptionable is her life. She cooks, she cleans, she yields to her husband’s priapic urges. She leaves nary a footprint on the world.

One night she has a dream, a violent, sanguine nightmare that resurrects a dormant memory of her and her older sister seeking shelter from their father in a copse of bleak woods. In the dream, she takes refuge from the darkness in a barn, only to find herself enmeshed in a labyrinth of “long bamboo sticks strung with great blood-red gashes of meat, blood still dripping down.” She tries “to push past but the meat, there’s not end to the meat, and no exit.” The next morning, Yeong-hye declares herself a vegetarian.

It is a fateful proclamation. She is surrounded by carnivores. Her husband pronounces her crazy, her father force feeds her meat, and her sister commits a horrific act that cannot be undone. In response, Yeong-hye, already a mere shadow of a being, turns further inward, her identify eventually receding so far that she is compelled to adopt another.

The Vegetarian contains a cascade of extraordinary, revelatory scenes of exploitive selfishness, sexual indulgence, and, perhaps most tragic, realization that one’s perceived strength might in fact be little more than self-protective cowardice. All are beautifully written, and in each a façade falls. The debris forms a message: A hard as it might to be truly know oneself, it is degrees more difficult to truly know another. “To thine own self be true,” advises the Bard. “Yes, of course,” Yeong-hye would reply, “but who is myself?’

The Vegetarian is a very human book, which means at times it is uncomfortable to read. If you don’t care for such emotional unease, it is not for you. But if you possess the knack, or the curiosity, for finding solace amid distress, then I highly recommend it.

Bookshelf – Einstein’s Dreams, Alan Lightman

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What if?

There is hardly a more revolutionary question. All human accomplishment rises from this two-syllable query, both beneficial and malevolent. The seeds of tools, language, art, philosophy, and science always sprout from an imagining of possibility.

In this context, think of young Albert Einstein, on the verge of publishing his famous formula, his mind churning with dreams about “the many possible natures of time.”  What if, he wonders, that unlike our familiar concept of linear time, there are worlds in which “time is a circle, bending back on itself,” or where people live just one day or, the opposite, live forever? What would life be like in such worlds?

In “Einstein’s Dreams,” physicist and novelist Alan Lightman answers that question with short, fantastical scenarios that presume how other versions of time would shape human behavior. In one imagined world, for example, where time advances more slowly at higher altitudes, the wealthy occupy the most vertiginous terrain in order to live longer. In another world, one without future, “each laugh is the last laugh” and “beyond the present lies nothingness (so) people cling to the present as if hanging from a cliff.”

In each tableau, people do what they always do: some conform to the demands of time out of greed or fear or simple acquiescence, others choose their own paths, occupying eddies of tranquility amid the surging river of time. These choices offer meditative lessons for your consideration.

Lest “Einstein’s Dreams,” seem too wonky, I assure you it is not. Lightman writes in spare, entertaining language whose rhythmic nature at times flirts with poetry. It is highly descriptive and fun to read.

Bookshelf — The Man Who Saw Everything, Deborah Levy

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Despite being, as the title declares, a man of omniscient vision, Saul Adler manages to live his rather truncated and self-consciously disengaged life without every becoming himself.

From the opening of the book, when Saul is struck by a car on London’s Abbey Road and then hours later kicked out of his girlfriend’s bed after he asks her to marry him, he is a man in flight – fleeing from intimacy, seeking what cannot be had, indulging in pleasures that consort with pain.

A professor of history whose field is the communist countries of Eastern Europe, Saul is a cipher, an androgynous wraith of a man berated by his father and bullied by his older brother for being a “Nancy boy” and told by his girlfriend, “You are much prettier than I am.” His beauty attracts men as well as women, but it alone cannot sustain relationships that wither for lack of emotional commitment. His girlfriend, a photographer, tells him, “You were so detached and absent, the only way I could reach you was with my camera.”

The story begins in 1988, just before the fall of the Berlin Wall – a moment critical to the narrative – and leaps to 2016, when another car accident in the same place (the crosswalk immortalized by the Beatles album cover) sends Adler somersaulting through his memories, a jumble of conflated moments lacking a cogent timeline. His life of flight becomes a free fall.

This is a beautiful book, exquisitely written, and loaded with trenchant dialogue, both spoken and heard through Saul’s introspection. The story is intimate, but not idle. There are many surprises, but Levy delivers them slyly. If you read “The Man Who Saw Everything” looking for the blow of a hammer you will miss the sting of Levy’s stiletto.

Finally, about the ending (without giving it away): the last few pages are among the most moving I’ve ever read, forcing a reader to turn toward a mirror and ask: Who am I?