The Hole by Hye-Young Pyun (translated by Sora Kim-Russell).
Title: The Hole.
Author: Hye-Young Pyun (translated by Sora Kim-Russell).
Genre: Fiction, old age, physical disability, mental health, abuse, thriller, horror.
Country: Korea.
Language: Korean.
Publication Date: 2016.
Summary: Oghi has woken from a coma after causing a devastating car accident that took his wife’s life and left him paralyzed and badly disfigured. His caretaker is his mother-in-law, a widow grieving the loss of her only child. Oghi is neglected and left alone in his bed. His world shrinks to the room he lies in and his memories of his troubled relationship with his wife, a sensitive, intelligent woman who found all of her life goals thwarted except for one: cultivating the garden in front of their house. But soon Oghi notices his mother-in-law in the abandoned garden, uprooting what his wife had worked so hard to plant and obsessively digging larger and larger holes. When asked, she answers only that she is finishing what her daughter started. As Oghi desperately searches for a way to escape, he discovers the difficult truth about his wife and the toll their life together took on her. A novel about the horrors of isolation and neglect in all of its banal and brutal forms.
My rating: 6.5/10
My review:
♥ It was only later he was on the elevator that Oghi realized he was back in the real world. Not the hospital room with its excessive illumination, the nurse gently examining him, the doctor patting him on the back and telling him "great job" when all he did was blink his eyes. What he'd really returned to was this noisy, crowded, queuing, waiting, leering world. The world where, as his doctor explained, the only way to survive was through sheer force of will.
♥ His wife had told him she wanted to be a journalist. She wanted to be a reporter like Oriana Fallachi and do amazing, groundbreaking interviews with famous people. She carried a photo of Fallachi around in her wallet. Not one of her as a war correspondent on a battlefield, nor one of her interviewing Kennedy or Deng Xiaoping. It was a photo of her sitting in front of a typewriter, staring blankly into space, dressed on a stiff Chanel suit and wearing a pearly necklace-a vanity shot, taken for Vogue or Elle magazine. Oghi had no idea if that ridiculous photo actually depicted the "journalist spirit" his wife was always going on about, but he did know that it showed what kind of person his wife real wanted to become.
Back then Oghi looked lovingly on his wife's shallow vanity.
♥ Oghi had a fear of people who prided themselves on following a single path through life, who pursued their goals relentlessly, turning a blind eye to everything but that goal until they achieved it. People like that were so replete with willpower that they readily scoffed at the weak-spined. They criticized those who relied on luck, and they refused to acknowledge even the most trivial of coincidences. They were excessively stubborn and self-righteous, oblivious to how pride could turn into violence, and constantly spoke down to others. They did not hide the fact that they thought they were better than everyone else, and they mocked the sense of loss-of having lost out, been passed over, fallen behind-felt by those who didn't agree with them. Every now and then, they would make a show of being open-minded and magnanimous, their attitude one of grand dispensation, but this came less from a love of humanity than from the fact that they didn't have to worry about money.
♥ After his father, who had spent his whole life handling iron, was laid to rest in a hard wooden coffin made from hemlock, Oghi received several documents. It was not a will. Just as his father had warned him, some of the documents would bring Oghi money while others would require him to pay back money. After doing the math, he found that he was left in debt. His father had spent a tremendous amount of money getting his business off the ground. But the amount wasn't so terrible as to make Oghi resent his father for passing away and bequeathing him nothing but bills. In fact, he couldn't help but wonder whether his father, who had always kept his ledgers meticulously balanced, hadn't planned it that way from the start: it was nearly the exact same amount that his father used to say he'd spent on raising Oghi while insisting that Oghi pay it back to him.
♥ The day they moved in, Oghi and his wife turned on all of the lights inside and outside the house. There were a lot of lights to be turned on. After flipping every switch, they set the motion-activated light over the front door to stay on continuously. In the yard were fourteen lanterns of varying sizes. They turned those on too. Their plan was to leave the lights burning all night. Oghi and his wife wanted to congratulate themselves on their bright future.
That night the lights burned as brightly as the lights in the hospital room where Oghi now lay. Their plan was to leave the bedroom lamp on as well, even if it meant tossing and turning in their sleep. But when Oghi awoke in the middle of the night, the lights had all been turned off.
When did all that light first start to fade?
♥ How does a life get so turned around in an instant? How does it fall apart, vanish, dwindle to nothing? Had Oghi secretly been helping this life in its plot to do exactly that?
♥ He remembered vividly the first time he'd met his mother-in-law. Oghi was nervous and had memorized his wife's two pieces of advice. The first was that her father was talkative and her mother was not. His plan was to be a good listener and applaud anything and everything his father-in-law said and to try to engage his mother-in-law in conversation. The second was, "My father has a lot, but I'm all my mother has." He took this to mean that her father was distant while her mother was clingy.
♥ People were always careful when asking Oghi about his parents. That was how he knew that he had experienced something he shouldn't have at such a young age. They avoided talking about his parents as much as possible, and when the subject did come up, they made sincere-sounding apologies for poking at old wounds. This offended Oghi. It felt no different than when he'd been ostracized as a child. The message he received from everyone was that not having parents was a shortcoming. Everyone knew it, and they demanded that he feel inadequate for it.
♥ It was the first time she'd told Oghi about her family. She might've not said anything before because she didn't think there was anything special about them, but to Oghi it was extremely interesting. He felt like he'd solved a riddle. It especially helped him to understand his mother-in-law. When he overlaid the image he had of Japanese people onto his mother-in-law, who was refined and elegant but difficult to get to know, certain things began to make sense. Though it wasn't a very nice method, whenever he felt like he didn't understand his wife's family, he simply told himself he was dealing with foreigners.
♥ Oghi had always had a hard time explaining what field he was in. Even when he said he did geography, people assumed he meant history. He'd taken pains in the beginning to explain that geography was the study of drawing the world whereas history was a form of literature in which you wrote about the world, but later he stopped feeling the need to explain. At any rate, experts knew the difference and non-experts didn't care.
..Oghi poured himself into researching map projections and spent considerable time staring at old rectangular maps. He studied as many as he could, from ancient Babylonian to contemporary. The more he did so, the more forlorn he felt. No matter how hard you tried to draw the world, you could never be extinct. That was what Oghi learned from his research. It was impossible to capture the trajectory of life in a map. Without one, there was no way of wrapping your brain around it all, and yet he was skeptical as to whether you could ever represent the world through maps alone.
But it was meaningful. Someone had taken these invisible trajectories that could not be studied with any sort of accuracy and had tried anyway to turn them into a tangible space. He found it boring sometimes for the same reason. A world that cold not be understood perfectly, could not be explained unambiguously, and was interpreted differently based on political purposes and conveniences was no different from the world he was already living in. And yet, the one way in which maps were clearly better than life was that they improved with failure. Life itself was merely an accumulation of failures, and those failures never made life better.
♥ The poem contained a line that read, The forties are well suited to all manner of sin. Thinking about that put him at relative ease. It reassured him to think that it wasn't just him, that it came with the decade.
..As far as Oghi was concerned, there was no better definition than the phrase "well suited to all manner of sin." The forties were ripe for sin. And there were two basic reasons: either you had too much, or you didn't have enough. In other words, the forties were when you found it easy to do bad things out of power, out of anger, or out of feeling left behind. People with too much power got arrogant and easily committed evil deeds. Anger and the sense that life had passed you by messed with your self-esteem, made you feel low, took away your patience, and made it easy to package your acts as being about justice. If you abused power, you were a snob; if you lashed out in anger, you were a loser. Therefore, the forties were the decade that showed you what your life had amounted to thus far. Not only that, they were also the decade in which you could guess at what lay ahead. Would you remain a snob? Or be left a loser?
♥ One day, Oghi asked his wife, "Why don't you hire a professional gardener and do something else with your time?"
She stared at him for a moment, her face unchanging, and quietly said, "Something else?"
"Something beside this, you know, something that will help you grow."
"I stopped growing a long time ago. Only plants keep growing, not people. We stop after a certain age."
♥ Oghi realized he'd made a mistake. There was nothing stupider than telling someone to grow or to find themselves, but that's precisely what he'd just done. And to his wife, who knew better than anyone what a hack he was.
Oghi decided to leave his wife alone.
♥ She might not have heard him properly, but it seemed that she knew it was him. He could hear her quiet breaths through the speaker. It sounded like she was crying. His throat closed up. There was still someone out there who cried over him.
♥ "The truth is on the march and nothing will stop it."
She stared directly at Oghi as she quoted Emile Zola.
If Oghi had asked her which truth was on the march, if he had tried to hear her out, she probably would have told him what was going on, even if she'd only meant the quote as a joke. But his wife's gaze and her mumbling rubbed him the wrong way. He sighed, said, "You're using that quote wrong," and got up and left.
It didn't occur to him until they were in the car on the way to their destination that maybe he should have heard her out. He'd been slow to realize that things between them had gotten to the point that this was the only way she could try to talk to him. As with all things in life, his realization came too late.
♥ His mother-in-law was the only family Oghi had left. And it finally hit him that it was the same for her too. They were each other's sole surviving family members. Of course, had his wife lived, their relationship might have become a non-familial one. That very nearly happened. But not anymore. Oghi and his mother-in-law had lost that chance, and now they were stuck with each other.
Oghi and his mother-in-law were learning the sides of each other that only family would see. His mother-in-law had screamed in front of him and thrown out his live-in caregiver. She had brought in a whole pack of people from some unsavory religious organization and bowed and scraped and showered them with offerings. She muttered to herself constantly in Japanese. Oghi was no better. She had to look after him. She had to wipe is crotch and sprinkle it with baby powder so he wouldn't get a rash. Empty his catheter bottles and wash his bedpan when it was full. Only now that his wife was dead had he sand his mother-in-law become true family.
♥ Oghi and his mother-in-law were alone in the house. It would be that way for a long time to come. His mother-in-law knew a lot of things. She did not hide it from Oghi. For all he knew she might have learned all of the things that his wife thought she knew. The problem was, Oghi had no idea what on earth his wife had known.
♥ Was that what his wife had wanted? Had she, simply for the purpose of making Oghi angry enough to end it, started telling him what she knew? She told him her plan was to make him lose everything. She said she would make sure it happened. She was more than capable.
Bur in the end she didn't. Oghi did it to himself. Not because of the car crash, and not because of the irreparable damage he suffered in the crash. He might have been losing everything all along, the whole time that he'd been loving his life, possibly since long, long before the crash, starting way back when he first had some vague inkling of what life was. He'd sensed it sometimes. A feeling that, despite how hard he had worked at everything, he was continuously missing something. That was why he sometimes clung all the more tenaciously.
♥ It was difficult and exhausting, but he quickly accepted the fact that life had to go on without her. He'd lost love, and yet the world was not the slightest bit shaken by his loss. The part of his life that had had J in it went away, leaving behind a cavity, a hollow, and still the world was unmoved. Nothing would ever fill in that empty space. But Oghi's world would keep on spinning regardless.
To be human was to be saddled with emptiness, and Oghi made use of this idea in his classes and lectures by saying that that might be the ultimate inner truth. He brought it up while explaining Babylonian maps.
The world's oldest map, the Babylonian Map of the World, had a little circle bored through the center. Scholars explained that the hole had come from using a compass to trace the two outer rings of the map. Oghi was captivated more by that hole than by the geometric shapes engraved in the clay tablet, and had stared at it for a long time in the darkened exhibit room of the British Museum. That dark, narrow hole went as deep as the memory of an age that no one could ever return to. The only way to reach that lost age was through that hole, but the hole itself could never be reached.
♥ It was a low move, but it's not like it was unfounded slander. Even if Oghi did use it to his advantage. Sometimes one's own success wasn't enough. Sometimes the failure of someone closer to your was better insurance.
♥ She grabbed his arms as he held on to the wheel and shook them.
If she hadn't done that, would they have been okay? If she hadn't told him what she was writing, if she had tried to calmly enjoy their weekend away and work on their relationship as they'd said they would when they first set out on the road, if Oghi had meekly apologized right away when she couldn't resist bringing up J again, if he had not made fun of his wife's incompetence?
Those were the hypotheticals Oghi considered while staring out at the blackness of the asphalt. None of his suppositions were optimistic. He felt certain that even if they moved on from that moment safely, something similar would come up before long and repeat itself over and over without end.
Oghi weakened and felt the cavity inside of him yawn open uncontrollably. He felt like throwing himself into that hole. The large vehicle blocking the view in front of him looked like a hole. It grew difficult to breathe, the pressure in his chest worsened. He was dizzy and on the verge of passing out from fatigue. He possessed a fierce attachment to life, but the impotence of that moment also refused to leave him. His wife wrenched at Oghi's arm as he held the steering wheel. Shocked, he shook her hands off as hard as he could.
They rear-ended the truck in front of them, smashed through the guardrail, and tumbled downhill. The moment he realized what was happening, Oghi relaxed. It was over. He felt free and easy. Though it was unfair to have worked so hard to make a life for himself only to lose it now, the fatigue of having to keep up that lifestyle was worse. Oghi waited to float up out of his body, to rise and put some distance between himself and the face of the earth.
Despite his wishes, Oghi was piledriven into the ground. His body was so heavy, he felt like he'd been buried deep below the earth. In the end, Oghi failed at sending his body aloft, into thin air.
His wife, at last, found success. While Oghi was squashed under the heavy heel of a impenetrable darkness, she grew light as smoke. She floated up and distanced herself from the earth. Perhaps she was even looking down at Oghi.
It was difficult to picture what look she might have had on her face while looking down at him. Had she grabbed his arm in order to steer them into the truck in front of them? Or was she trying to stop Oghi from doing the same? He had no way of knowing. Clueless as to whether his wife had tried to save or assist Oghi as he sped into the truck, Oghi had survived while his wife died.
♥ Rejection of paralysis. Oghi found this strange new term appalling. He knew his own body. It had taken a long time to reach its current shape, but it had been with him since birth. His body was his closest ally, his constant companion. It wasn't like his spirit or his heart, which never did what he wanted them to, which acted of their own accord, with no respect to him.
♥ "I'm said."
"Huh?"
His wife slowly recited the part she'd just read in her book. It was the story of a man who narrowly escapes death. One day as he's walking past a construction site, a beam falls and lands right in front of him. Though he isn't injured, he realizes how close he has come to dying and comes up with an idea.
"Why is that sad? That's lucky."
"He disappears. He leaves everything behind, even his savings, and takes off without bothering to quit his job or cancel any of his appointments. He doesn't leave any clues for his friends or family or colleagues either, but just vanishes completely. Just like that. His wife hires a detective to look for him. She worries that he could be hurt or in a coma somewhere or wandering around with amnesia, not knowing who his family is. That's the only way she can accept his disappearance. After a while, the detective tracks him down. He's alive and safe and living in another city where he has changed his name and found a new job. With his new family."
"I guess his wife wasn't too happy about that."
"I don't think it's that. I think it's what she learns from it."
"What?"
Instead of answering, she'd stared at him.
Oghi quickly asked, "That he can have a good life somewhere else without her?"
That time as well she simply stared at him. Oghi had grown impatient and tried a different tack.
"So then what happens?"
"That's the end."
"He doesn't go back to his family?"
"It says they get a divorce."
"That's pretty mean. Do they at least end up happy?"
She'd started crying. At first he thought she was just tearing up a little, but soon she was sobbing loudly. Why? Because of a man lucky enough to survive a freak accident? Because of a man who leaves one day? Because of a man who makes a new life for himself that's hardly any different from his old life? Was that why she was crying?
Oghi looked at his crying wife and laughed. How was that a sad story? What a thing to cry over. Had his wife always been this emotional? It made no sense to him, but he was amused by her sentimentality and wanted to make her feel better. We'll always be together, he told her, no matter what happens, I won't cross over into the great beyond without you. It wasn't until much later that he realized how much better it would've been if he'd let her find her own way out of this grief, slowly, without any empty promises or hasty conclusions. Oghi had quietly held his wife, who seemed to be experiencing some future grief that had not yet taken place, and watched as her tears slowed and then stopped.
The fact that he was now lying at the bottom of a deep, dark hole did not mean that Oghi finally understood his wife's grief. But it did make him realize how completely he had failed at comforting her. His wife's tears had stopped not because she was no longer sad, but because the time had come to stop crying.
And at last, Oghi cried. Not because of his wife. But because his time for crying had come.