Books & Boba discussion

Happy Spooktober! For this month we will be reading The Hole by Hye-young Pyun. Not the Japanese novel of the same name, mind you!

Here is the synopsis:

Ogi 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. Ogi 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 Ogi 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.

This is one of those books that I'm very glad will be discussed on the podcast. Very dark and hard for me to process what each character's motivations are and their deep lack of empathy..

Great pick for October. The imagery of the vines climbing and covering the window was very creepy to me.
This story reminded me a bit of The Vegetarian. The similarities between the wife characters, and how the story is built around a character we get third person view of.
What Ogi is put through is obviously terrible and the humiliation scenes were unsettling to read but, he sucks (not justifying what happened to him) but I could understand (to a point) how a mother in law, in her grief wanted some type of revenge.