The Hole: A Novel
家族の日常が些細な事件をきっかけに崩れていく過程を通して、身体的変化と記憶の不安定さが心理的恐怖へと変わる長編。静かな筆致で日常の裂け目を描く。
作品情報
日常のほころびが、そのまま恐怖の入口になる。
家族の生活が小さな出来事を境に崩れていく様子を通して、身体性と記憶の不安定さを描く長編。静かな筆致が、じわじわとした不穏さを生み出す。
書籍情報
- 出版社
- Arcade
- 発売日
- 2018-10-23
- ページ数
- 208ページ
- 言語
- 英語
- サイズ
- 13.97 x 1.02 x 20.96 cm
- ISBN-13
- 9781628729917
- ISBN-10
- 1628729910
- 価格
- 3637 JPY
- カテゴリ
- 洋書/Mystery & Thrillers/Thrillers/Psychological & Suspense
Winner of the Shirley Jackson Award. Named One of the Top 10 Thrillers to Read This Summer by Time Magazine. Misery meets The Vegetarian in this psychological thriller about loneliness and the dark truths we try to bury. In this tense, gripping novel by a star of Korean literature, 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. A bestseller in Korea, The Hole is a superbly crafted and deeply unnerving novel about the horrors of isolation and neglect in all of its banal and brutal forms. 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.
Hye-young Pyun was born in 1972. She earned her undergraduate degree in creative writing and graduate degree in Korean literature from Hanyang University. Her published works include the short story collections Aoi Garden , To The Kennels , Evening Courtship , and Night Passes ; and the novels City of Ash and Red , They Went to the Western Forest , The Law of Lines , The Hole , and Let The Dead . She has received the Hankook Ilbo Literary Award, the Yi Hyo-Seok Literature Prize, the Today's Young Writer Award, the Dong-in Literary Award, the Yi Sang Literary Award, and the Contemporary Literature (Hyundai Munhak) Award. Her novel The Hole was the 2017 winner of the Shirley Jackson Award, and City of Ash and Red was an NPR Great Read. In 2019, she was awarded the Kim Yujeong Literary Award for her short story "Hotel Window." Her short stories have been published in The New Yorker , Harper's Magazine , and Words Without Borders . She currently teaches creative writing at Myongji University and lives in Seoul, Korea. Sora Kim-Russell 's translations include, besides The Hole , City of Ash and Red, and The Law of Lines by Hye-young Pyun, Un-su Kim's The Plotters; Hwang Sok-yong's At Dusk , which was longlisted for the Man Booker International Prize; and Suah Bae's Nowhere to be Found . Her full list of publications can be found at sorakimrussell.com. She lives in Seoul, South Korea.
レビュー
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Odd but quiet
This is a strange book. Admittedly I was expecting a book a little more like Cipher when I started. It is a quiet story, with a invisible dread that lurks in the corners but never shows its head. If you are the kind of person that likes introspective, reflective novels, this is a good one to consider. That being said, the ending comes unexpectedly and may leave some readers feeling cheated.
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If you are struggling with mental health issues- this isn't for you
I thought the premise of this story sounded was interesting. It's a very slow moving piece, and the writing is lovely as it slowly winds its way through the story, but for me, only a hint of the psychological terror that was supposed to be so strong in the book. There was one instance early on when Oghi's in the hospital that was creepy and I thought the rest of the book would follow suit, but it didn't. So I think this is more of a deeper look into depression, deception, and hopelessness in life. So if you have any mental health issues, or need care after trauma, this would just enhance the feeling of hopelessness. I read the editorial reviews after finishing the book and they just don't match with what I expected from this. It's still a good book, just not sure it fits in with the genre I thought it was in.
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Helps to be familiar with emotional abuse
[Somewhat spoilers herein.] What a clever novel. You're led through the story by a limited third-person point of view-- and I think your ability to grasp the tiny nuances framed oh-so-innoculously by the narrator will hinge on how sensitive you are to picking up on the red flags associated with this type of toxic dynamic. By the end, you will have secondhandedly experienced it, in how you're drawn in to empathize heavily with the protagonist, only to have him reveal hints of sharp details that cut through the initial Nice Guy illusion at the very end. Oghi is accomplished, driven, and self-made. And he deals with a wife who is unfortunate in life but fortunate enough in love that she has found a good husband in him. The impact is definitely more of a psychological punch than an emotional one, which fits the type of person the author was meaning to portray through Oghi. There is no explicit villain in the traditional westernized sense, because human beings simply are messy and wonderful like that. But there is a central source from which all the drama stems, and the blame-shifting is done so subtly that you simply accept it for what it is. A somewhat dry (due to the character POV, I'm guessing, since I haven't picked up the author's other works yet), but quick read, that could possibly be considered a "fridge thriller" for how enjoyable it is to think about in retrospect.
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I Probably Just Didn't Get It
I'm blaming this purely on postpartum brain because I usually love books like this but man. This missed the mark. The story goes nowhere and tells you nothing. It's somehow too short and too long at the same time. Hated it.
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A great book
Some people compared this book with Stephen King's "Misery", but they're absolutely different. "Misery", of course, it's a great novel, but this one have a heart. A woman's heart. It's a sad story about two helpless people and the enormous hole they dig for themselves.
関連する文学賞
- シャーリー・ジャクソン賞 第11回（2017年） ・Winner