A friend and I read The Vegetarian, by Han Kang. Here are some high-level
reactions, and a selection of my quotes + notes in the expandable sections. You
can see other deep-dive art reactions at the art_crit tag.
Cultural Cavendish bananas: prestige, awards, and safe along what axis
Thinking of how to describe The Vegetarian, the main thing I want to say is
"well, it won a Nobel. It's like that." This isn't that informative on its own,
so I'll elaborate.
Every piece is greatly informed by its market. When I talk about loving New
York theatre, everyone incorrectly thinks I mean Broadway. While there's a lot
to love about it: Broadway is where creativity goes to die. You don't see
actually challenging work on Broadway, because people don't pay for that. The
success case for Broadway is tickets being so in-demand you're able to
charge $600 for them, like Hamilton at its peak. You aren't going to
get that with naked silver people dancing to Yoko Ono, or a piece that reminds
audiences that tax dollars subsidize CIA black sites. Mike Pence went to
Hamilton. People pay to have a good fucking time.
Broadway is the Pringles of theatre: it's reliably safe and delicious. If you
get upset with a Broadway show for not being daring or interesting enough,
that's on you. You should know when you walk in: Broadway is for craft,
it's for the stars, it's for bombast, it's for "safe prestige."
Another example: AAA video games. I've linked this ancient essay from a game
developer a few other places, but permit the big quote, since nobody
ever clicks links (emphasis his):
Correct games
There is a form to modern console games. If you've played the recent Bioshock
Infinite, you can see the full glory of the vision. These are great games,
especially if you know and appreciate the immense skill that goes into their
creation. Each element serves a business purpose.
First there is a world rendered in lush 3D. This justifies the hardware.
Next are intermittent dollops of plot. These are voice acted because it is a
quality signal. They feature intricately modeled characters on a virtual
stage. This gives the arc narrative momentum and lets you know you've
finished something meaningful.
Filling out the gaps in the 7-12 hours ride are moments of rote game play with
all possible feedback knobs tuned to 11. Blood, brains, impact. Innovation is
located at 11.2. This makes you feel something visceral.
Each element of this form is refined to a most perfect formula. There are
crate-raised critics who make subtle distinctions between the 52 historical
shades of grey. There are documents and research. If you are a creative
working at or within a publisher, your higher purpose is to judge games based
off their adherence to the form. The game is a product and consistency, much
like that found in McDonalds fries, results in repeat purchases. As a
publisher designer, you are someone with taste.
You police the act of creation. It is a job. It is a set of orders that come
from above. It is your childhood dream.
We haven't really broken this form, even a decade later. This leads to AAA
game pretty much playing themselves; here's a video on how
God of War has "puzzles," but they don't even give you time to solve them
before an NPC points you to the answer. The video suggests it's because in
playtesting, n% of players got frustrated without the hints, and even for
small values of n, that's hundreds of thousands of players, which is tens of
millions in revenue, which you can't afford for a game with this budget.
So, if I talk about Marvel Midnight Suns and say "it's a AAA game," you
already know a lot about it.
Another example with a short video
For years, big-budget CG animated films only used one "style" of animation, a
bit like the "correct games" formula:
So if I said "it's a mass-market computer-animated film from 1995-2017," you
probably know something about what it looks like.
Back to The Vegetarian: it won a Nobel! What does that mean, concretely?
To me: it's a novel that's going to commit hard to its own seriousness; it can't
be a piece someone puts down and says "that was very entertaining!" The crowd
that judges Nobels calls things "entertaining" to exclude them from the Nobel.
It should feel good to consume, but not because it entertained you: it's going
to have portent. It has to contain something called "meaning" for a broad
swath of international, book-reading intelligensia. It won't have big genre
elements (fantasy, sci-fi) unless they're sheened with prestige, e.g. Latin
American magical realism.
It touches Deep Feelings, but will not be prescriptive about them: it takes you
80% of the way there, then lets you imagine the last 20. Like Best Picture Oscar
winners, it will probably bend towards tragedy over joy, humor, or inspiration,
as I think its audience feels safer to ascribe deep or authentic feelings to sad
ones.
Maybe a little saucier: if it's from a non-White place, it'll be viewed,
purposefully or not, as a window into that culture, so it'll probably be lightly
titillating to a presumed-White audience. Back when we had record stores,
behind the "Pop" and "Rock" sections, past the "Jazz" and near "Classical,"
there was a section called "World" with CDs that had African drums, or
didgeridoos, or pan flutes. US audiences would close their eyes and Culturally
Appreciate it. I feel non-White Nobel winners for literature have a whiff of
this. Which brings us to our next section...
Spoiler-ey read on this, re: The Vegetarian
Where the "it's a Nobel" comes through strongest for me is allowing (by my
count) Three Big Readings for what happened with Yeong-hye, while committing to
none of them:
The Literal Reading: Something Magical Happened Here. In this, the dream
sequences were an actual haunting by some kind of spirit. Yeong-hye's actually
undergoing some kind of plant transformation. The improbable Mongolian Marks
are literal, and Something Important, Maybe Magical. I don't think many people
will read it this way.
The rationalist trauma reading: she's escaping pain. When it comes out in
Part 3 that she didn't want to go home from the woods that time because of
parental abuse, it reminded me of the Twilight Zone episode The Bewitchin'
Pool, where terrible parents alienate their children so much the kids
escape to a fantasy dimension at the bottom of the pool; the parents only see
them jump in and never return. I always thought that was a metaphor for
childhood suicide or runaways, a warning to awful parents that you can drive
your children to disappear from you or the world. Yeong-hye's dissolution
might be a snowball that started from childhood. In this reading, this could
have all been avoided, and she was always capable of being a mentally healthy
person, if she hadn't suffered abuse, or if folks had intervened or treated
her like a full, capable, human at any point in her life. "Become a plant" as
a sweet-flavored, suicidal cope.
The psychosis reading: trauma be damned, some people are just medically
sick. A college friend volunteered at a mental institution, and told me
about one of the patients: a White guy who was convinced he was Nick Cannon
from Drumline. Sometimes it's trauma-informed, but for many people, their
brains just don't work, and this is also tragic. There's a reading where
Yeong-hye is simply sick. This is what the characters in-world go with, and I
think it's a fair reading.
Besides the style (airy, while still carrying heft), I think the most
Nobel-winning novel thing happening is teasing all three of these but then
pointing at your book club and saying "Which was it? You decide!"
Why "Cavendish" in the title? 🍌 (digression)
This should be its own blog post, but: a lot of these "commercial forces flatten
what we can make" produces what I call the "cultural Cavendish banana." If you
didn't know, (likely) every banana you've had in your life is a clone of a
single one, called the Cavendish. It's to do with capitalism, market
forces, and colonialism, but the solution to a set of problems was to make the
entire banana market consist of clones of this one, single banana.
Bananas can have genetic diversity: imagine a world with varietals like apples
have (Fuji, Granny Smith, Honeycrisp, McIntosh...). We had that, and we lost it.
I think market forces broadly do that to culture. When Disney extends Public
Domain deadlines again, when a billionaire buys a newspaper or sues a fun
one out of existence, when we increasingly use AI which can only produce
work based on what we've produced before... we're Cavendishing. We're
homogenizing, we're cutting off branches of artistic and expressive diversity.
Our kids will never know how good or wild culture can even be, because we
eliminated it one decision at a time.
But on the point of cultural loss: since we never knew it, we don't mourn it, so
does it really matter? I want to believe it does, but I can't be sure? I'd say
it's sad, but everyone lives in a world that's had shit built and destroyed.
I can mourn the banana varietals in the abstract, but I promise you I've never
thought (and probably don't ever think) about them unless I choose to. It's not
an acute pain. I'll never know what living in a world with oceans full of whales
would be like either. I could pretend this hurts me, but to be honest, I don't
think it has to, unless I let it.
To be clear: I don't think the Nobel is a major perpetrator of this. But it's
somewhat related to what I point out in the section: "awards, like markets,
only accept things that take a certain shape."
If I'm reading this novel, and find something objectionable (e.g. "wow! why is
this acceptable in a marriage!?"), is it okay if I ascribe it to a country's
culture? Better question, can I stop myself? Should I?
I'm no expert on Korea, but I saw Past Lives recently, which
follows a woman whose family left Korea for Canada when she was a little girl.
She grows up pretty Westernized and marries a White American, but reunites with
her best friend from her time in Korea, a boy who loved her, now grown into a
man. After she reunites with him and her husband inquires how it went, she tries
reassuring her husband with "well, he's extremely Korean." In that phrase, she's
communicating something about how the Korean man interprets a number of
topics like masculinity, emotional expression, marriage and love, and duties,
versus how her American husband does.
So reading The Vegetarian, there are some dynamics at play with the
characters, their relationships, their communication styles, and when I reacted
to them, I didn't know how to feel, or react to those feelings. Within each
character's interiority, there's a lot happening with their relationship to
wants, desire, and agency. It's all juicy stuff, and I loved chewing on it. But
I wonder how much of the fun I had was being an outsider looking in, and forming
an incomplete picture of another culture. And I wondered how I should feel about
reading this and being like "ooooOOH! Korea!!"
Guatemala's most famous literary work is a Nobel winner too, El Señor
Presidente, a book on the horrors of dictatorship. I love that we have
that, I love that people read it, and I love that people enjoy it. But I get
the ick at imaging foreigners reading it, and thinking that's most of their
impression of Guatemala. "Oh, how horrible that place is, with their
dictatorship." We have joyful families, we have laughter and mirth, we
have vice and alcoholism, we have torrid affairs, people beating the odds,
doctors successfully treating cancer patients. We founded Duolingo,collaborate with Hollywood to make movies, and got to portray Moon
Knight.
So I had a background process while reading asking myself: how does the author
navigate representing their culture without making it a piece about the
culture for foreigners to gawk at? How you foster international acclaim without
writing for a foreign audience? Can you write about your own people's shit
without inviting others to point from the outside and say "wow, you guys have
some shit, huh?"
Lost in translation
I wasn't wild about the Solo movie, but I'm so, so glad
they didn't just "digitally de-age" the main actors, or worse, CGI them like they did to
Grand Moff Tarkin. Let people make art, dammit.
My feelings on one idea got big and far away enough that I'm going to write
its own post: the idea is "artistic handoffs," the various beautiful mutations
that happen when a piece of art gets handed off from party A to party B, like
relay runners passing a baton. Have a sneak peek at the bullet point outline if
you're curious:
Bullets for the "artistic handoffs," see if you can figure out what I mean here.
Works in translation
Adaptations
Cross-media (Annihilation, When the Yogurt Came, Lucifer)
Remakes, homages (Bride and Prejudice)
My Shakespeare rant
Fan interpretations
That Chrono Trigger fan project
Black Mesa
Casting choices
Evrart and Joyce
Hot'n'Throbbing with mixed-race couples
Dr. Who
Collaborations
Chrono Trigger
the estates of dead people
Actual handoffs
Dune books
Dr. Who showrunners
then the punchline. Finish with Recorded music metaphor.
Smith's translation was criticized in South Korea for inaccuracies. The Los
Angeles Times noted that Smith embellished Han's writing style, quoting a
translator who called it an "adaptation" rather than a translation. Scholars
have pointed out various mistakes, including concerns that Smith may have
attributed some of the dialogue to the wrong characters. Writing for The
Guardian, Claire Armitstead felt that Smith's "activist" translation
helped make South Korean literature more accessible. Smith defended her
translation in the Los Angeles Review of Books.
There's a lot of juicy back-and-forth there! The author, meanwhile, seems
more than content with their translator:
Talking about the process, Han said, "Deborah usually sends me the file
of her translation after she finishes, with notes and questions. And I send it
back to her with my answers and notes. It is just like having a chat
endlessly. I truly enjoy this process. I am lucky to have met Deborah, a
wonderful translator who can render subtlety and delicacy." Smith has said
that her first attempt at Korean translation involved "looking up practically
every other word in the dictionary". Smith has translated some of Han's other
works, including Human Acts (2016) and The White Book (2017).
So, again, this book gave me another background process the whole time: What
does a translator have to do to become celebrated? I feel like translation is a
bit like computer security, or the risk function for a lender: it's a loser-only
game so that when you're doing well, nobody notices you, and if you got noticed,
you probably "lost."
Agency, reality
After three sections on the macro, we're finally, finally talking about the
work.
Agency
I asked myself a lot of questions about agency in this book. Before deciding to
full-throat support authoritarians from 2016 onwards, Peter Thiel was showing us
he flirted with authoritarianism by saying in 2009
I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible
Because to him, having us get in his way by voting for things he doesn't
want (like making him pay taxes) is an assault on his freedom.
I really don’t know what you do about the "taxes are theft" crowd, except
possibly enter a gambling pool regarding just how long after their no-tax
utopia comes true that their generally white, generally entitled, generally
soft and pudgy asses are turned into thin strips of Objectivist Jerky by the
sort of pitiless sociopath who is actually prepped and ready to live in the
world that logically follows these people’s fondest desires.
The truth is: we live in a society! You were born in a society, benefit(ted)
from that society; you can't just say "I want something they don't allow," pull
out of the social contract, and expect this to have zero consequences,
practical or ethical. I know many people who might want to drink a daquiri
from the skull of Peter Thiel, I suspect he very much believes in the
Taxpayer-funded State with a Monopoly in Violence in instances where it protects
him. He used taxpayer-funded judges to shut down Gawker, after all.
Libertarians being dickbags aside: you don't have to work to hard to have a more
charitable read on this talking point. Many of my friends and I want safe,
legal abortion to be widely available and federally protected, but the US
democracy allowed us to put people in place who took that away. Many people
enjoy doing drugs, and it seems in places where it's legal, it's much, much
safer, but a number of people don't make it politically safe to campaign on
that. While I think the message "democracy is good" is more important to trumpet
right now, you can argue technical correctness in spotting the two in conflict.
In The Vegetarian (spoilers)
Especially in Part 1, I kept saying: she's not doing a damn thing to anybody!
Everyone's working themselves up into madness and all she's doing is going
vegan. Her husband hates her, her dad assaults her, and for what, ultimately?
I think good art pulls on strings you don't see, or don't consciously
acknowledge. It reminds you of the missing stair you've been avoiding and forgot
about. It's true that when someone becomes vegetarian or vegan, and their
partner or family isn't, it causes friction. There was the business dinner
scene, and again: if I said I didn't understand how she was creating tension in
that scene (especially by going bra-less), I'd be lying, even if that tension is
shallow and stupid and I disagree that it should cause tension.
So I liked the device: my head being like "everyone leave her alone," while my
body was feeling like "oh, people are going to give her hell for this" and while
I feel like they shouldn't have, that tension in my body was delicious.
This extends to Parts 2 and 3 as well, where she's mostly just trying to live a
way she likes, and everyone is fretting and losing their minds about it, thought
the cause for worry is a bit more justified in Part 3.
Here are some notes related to this section:
In the five years we'd been married, this was the first time I'd had to go
to work without her handing me my things and seeing me off. "You're insane!
You've completely lost it."
Congrats, you and her weren't a marriage of two equal humans, now she's
becoming one, and it freaks you the hell out.
♠♥♣♦
In any other case, it was nothing but sheer obstinacy for a wife to go
against her husband's wishes as mine had done.
Korean horror, or alternatively, Korean Magical Realism: a wife exercises
agency.
♠♥♣♦
But it was no easy thing for a man in the prime of his life, for whom
married life had always gone entirely without a hitch, to have his physical
needs go unsatisfied for such a long period of time. So yes, on nights when
I returned home late and somewhat inebriated after a meal with colleagues, I
would grab my wife and push her to the floor. Pinning down her struggling
arms and tugging off her trousers, I became unexpectedly aroused.
Fellas, you ever just rape your wife?
Christ. A horror novel where the monster is the latent patriarchy of marriage.
People losing their mind lol
♠♥♣♦
As soon as the strength in Yeong-ho’s arms was visibly exhausted, my wife
growled and spat out the meat. An animal cry of distress burst from her
lips.
People violating her left and right. And you're just watching
Care
What does it mean to care for somebody? Between everyone who thinks they're
doing something good for her, who do you think is, actually? If your sibling
were going through something like this, how would you act? Her practices
get more extreme over time, do you think it was inevitable to end where it
did, do you think there were possible interventions sooner in the process that
would have changed the outcome? To what degree do you believe each of the three
big readings in the previous sidebar?
Comparisons to Sailor, with many of the same issues
If you'd asked me what my most me novel was between the ages of 17 and, say,
28, I would have replied The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea, by
Yukio Mishima. We read it in IB English Higher, and at the time I had no idea
how strange and rare a book it was. Good luck trying to read it: there's no
English ebook, no audiobook. Mishima's craft is the top of the game, but also:
what a weird dude! With a weird end! This book spoke to me.
When I read The Vegetarian, Sailor was the closest book that came to mind,
stylistically. The prose is spare. It's got occasional flourishes and poetry,
but nobody would call it "ornate" or "flowery." It describes some absolute
horrors, but in spare language, almost aloof. Both describe tortured interiority
with a cool exterior. Something about characters as internally hot as a furnace,
desperately wanting, but only able to navigate a functional, more boring person
day-to-day.
I wonder how much is that they're works in translation, though? I hate to be the
person who just compares "two East Asian writers in translation."
Grab bag
I hope the rest of this was interesting enough; if you've read the book (or
don't care about spoilers), this is where it'll get juicier. These are my notes,
pretty raw: the double-quoted section is a passage from the novel, the
single-quoted is my note, and any context I'm adding at this point of writing is
has no quoting.
Grab bag of notes
When I went back into the bedroom my wife was lying down, her legs curled up
to her chest, the silence so weighted I might as well have been alone in the
room.
You make her into a shadow and now she's a ghost in a horror story lol. A
Doll's House.
Here I'm referencing Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House, a play with a twist ending
that shows that the "domestic normalcy" you've been watching is horrible,
actually. Generally in Parts 1 and 2, I was struck by the horror tropes that
were employed to give the whole thing a haunted feel, when she's not actually
doing anything.
♠♥♣♦
Her reply was so methodical, it was as if she thought that this ridiculous
decision of hers was something completely rational and appropriate.
"Wife who's waiting with your stuff in the suitcases is the one you have to
fear."
This is a reference to an ancient meme I can't find anymore. It's got two
scenes: one with a woman hysterically throwing her man's clothes out the second
floor window while the guy is pleading forgiveness on the lawn, and the second
is a woman cooly sitting outside her house watching the man approach, with all
his stuff in suitcases. It read something like:
"You may think the first scenario is scarier for the guy: she's clearly really
upset, there's a lot more energy, she's saying meaner and more devastating
things. That's not true: the scenario you should be afraid to come home to is
the second. The first is momentary passion, and you can usually talk her down.
The opposite of love isn't hate, it's apathy, and she's probably still in love.
The second? She planned this. Your stuff was packed when she knew you'd be
gone. She acquired the suitcases. You better bet your keys don't work anymore.
There's no coming back from that."
I guess I thought of that when I was reading this passage.
♠♥♣♦
I envied her husband. He was an art college graduate who liked to pose as an
artist, yet didn’t contribute a single penny to their household finances.
True, he had some property that he’d inherited, but he didn’t bring in a
salary—in fact, his activities were limited to sitting around and not doing
an awful lot of anything. Now that In-hye had rolled up her sleeves and gone
back to work, her husband was free to spend his whole life messing about
with "art," without a single worry to trouble his comfortable existence. Not
only that, but In-hye was also a skilled cook, just as my wife used to be.
Setting up an Abel Sanchez?
This novel is also the narrator realizing he has wants and feelings. Real
[redacted]-ass man here.
Abel Sanchez is a novel I read in high school; it's a novel-and-essay
from a philosopher who uses the fiction to illustrate his point. He was trying
to argue that of all the sins, envy is the root one, that all the rest can be
framed as some expression of envy. His fictional parable was about Joaquin
(Spanish "Cain") being driven to madness over his envy for Abel Sanchez (the
whole thing is full of examples of Able outdoing Cain, e.g. the book is named
after him). I wondered if these guys would have that dynamic.
[Redacted] is the name of a group of people I was close to. Generally, the dudes
in this group value one type of knowledge but are, by my standards, incredibly
dense about feelings, terrible at talking about them or acknowledging that they
have them, or recognizing why that's valuable. Mostly tall White dudes with
science educations who don't realize that when they're saying "my point is
rational," they mostly mean "I've made a rationalization." So the dudes in the
book here remind me of those dudes: acting confidently but cruelly,
rationalizing everything to themselves, braying with little introspection, all
at the expense of the women around them.
♠♥♣♦
"Eat it quickly! My arm hurts…" My mother-in-law’s arm was actually
trembling. Eventually, my wife stood up. "I won’t eat it."
Nobel Prize Bartleby the Scrivener
♠♥♣♦
Yells and howls, threaded together layer upon layer, are enmeshed to form
that lump. Because of meat. I ate too much meat. The lives of the animals I
ate have all lodged there. Blood and flesh, all those butchered bodies are
scattered in every nook and cranny, and though the physical remnants were
excreted, their lives still stick stubbornly to my insides.
Feeling something wrong with you a la body horror? True self in the false
self, like dinosaurs and oil? And this extends to eggs and milk?
I felt an odd trembling inside myself, and reached out with my index finger
to touch her philtrum. She was alive.
Use of philtrum!! 10 points!
♠♥♣♦
Part 2
He had to force himself to accept that the middle-aged man, who had a
baseball cap concealing his receding hairline and a baggy sweater at least
attempting to do the same for his paunch, was himself.
Part 2 also opens with a man with a paunch who seems indifferent to his wife.
♠♥♣♦
No, it had to be her. He’d imagined what her naked body must look like and
began to draw, finishing it off with a dot like a small blue petal in the
middle of her buttocks, and he’d got an erection.
Weird male arousal count++
Is this what women feel like when we write their inner thoughts blandly?
I didn't make it its own section, but lord, the descriptions of male desire in
this are cringe. Dudes are like "yes. I saw her body. When I saw it differently
that one time, I had an erection." There are a bunch of examples, like the
sexual assault one I quoted in the previous section.
♠♥♣♦
and so, unable to put his finger on just what it was that he felt she was
lacking, he’d made up his mind to marry her. In fact, it was only when he
was introduced to her sister that he realized what it was his new wife was
missing.
Do the men in Korea realize marriage is a lifelong commitment? Both these guys
are like "She was mid but I figured I'd marry her, y'know?"
♠♥♣♦
What threw him was the way that his brother-in-law seemed to consider it
perfectly natural to discard his wife as though she were a broken watch or
household appliance. "Now don’t go making me out to be some kind of villain.
Anyone can see that I’m the real victim here."
All books are about Patriarchy
♠♥♣♦
The two of them took a seat by the window. He looked across at her in
silence as she mixed red bean into the shaved ice slush and licked it from
the tip of her wooden spoon. As if there were a wire linking her tongue with
his body, every time that little pink tip darted out he found himself
flinching as though from an electric shock.
The men in this are reactive pieces of meat themselves.
♠♥♣♦
"What’s got into you?" He’d put his hand over her mouth then, so he wouldn’t
have to hear that nasal voice. He pushed himself toward the image of her,
finding it there in his wife’s nose and lips, the child-like curve of her
neck, all outlined vaguely in the darkness. With her nipple standing
straight and hard in his mouth, he reached down and pulled off her knickers.
Every time he wanted to get the image of the small blue petal to open and
close, he shut his eyes and tried to block out his wife’s face.
Guys With Paunches Dehumanize Their Wives, Fucking Them Without Love
♠♥♣♦
"Aren't you cold?" He wiped away his sweat, stood up and spread his sweater
over her shoulders. "It wasn't difficult for you?" This time she looked at
him and laughed. Her laughter was faint but lively, seeming to reject
nothing and be surprised by nothing.
Something lightly Manic Pixie about her, where her inhumanity (or
superhumanity) was to make her a horror trope to husband in part one, and now
some siren who says 11 words in Part 2
♠♥♣♦
Did that insensitive oaf know about her Mongolian mark? He couldn't imagine
their naked bodies twined together without its seeming insulting, and
defiling, and violent.
Buddy how did you fuck your wife last night
♠♥♣♦
Her calm acceptance of all these things made her seem to him something
sacred. Whether human, animal or plant, she could not be called a "person,"
but then she wasn't exactly some feral creature either—more like a
mysterious being with qualities of both.
She's not allowed, by either the author, or her characters, or just my
internality reading and interpreting this way, to ever be a person
♠♥♣♦
He hesitated, he’d promised himself he wouldn't do this, but as she gazed
over at the pitch-black window he couldn't stop himself from taking a
close-up of her face. The screen filled with her pale lips, the shadowed
hollow above her protruding collarbones, her forehead with her disheveled
hair, and her two empty eyes.
She didn't have a face before (in shadow while he painted), here he breaks a
rule so she can have one, and it's a collection of features. Like an animal
drawn up for cuts of meat.
♠♥♣♦
"Whatever you like," she murmured, then gestured toward her chest. "Will
this come off with water?" As though this practical detail was the only
thing she was curious about. "I wouldn't have thought it’d come off too
easily. You’ll have to wash it a few times to—" She interrupted him. "I
don’t want it to come off."
I found this very touching (that she gets to feel beautiful in her
body again, see it in a new light, receive love from someone who treasures
her, in contrast to husband. Look how easily and effortlessly he talks about
eating together with her, knowing she won't eat meat. It's just a casual
"let's grab a bite").
But also; a bit siren-ey? Manic Pixie Dream Girl-ey?
♠♥♣♦
A large speckled moth, a type she’s never seen before, flutters up off the
surface of the wall, into a darkness saturated with damp. She pauses for a
while, looks up at its beating wings. But on the pitch-black tunnel ceiling,
the moth stays put, as though conscious of being observed.
This extended moth sequence… this thing feels like Slave Play. Three very
disjoint acts that are titillating and pRoVoCaTiVe but feel a bit tryhard.
Reading Part 2 it felt like Part 1 was an idea she took as far as she could,
then needed to extend it and wrote another short story. Part 3, and its tonal
shift, so far isn't disabusing me of this.
Slave Play was a show that went up in NY, I saw the original production,
it went to Broadway later. I think it sucked, but part of my distaste comes from
the cast/crew of it picking fights with people online and calling all its
critics Haters and Idiots and People Who Just Weren't Ready, Man!!. It was
decent, if un-self-aware, provocation porn for the first two acts, but Act 3
involved it attaching rocket thrusters behind its head, pointed the head-rocket
up its own ass, and launching. Just an incoherent, patronizing mess.
Anyway, the three parts of this novel reminded me of it, structurally: three
parts where 1 and 2 were seemingly composed at different times, then a radical
shift for the third act.
♠♥♣♦
It wasn’t long before she realized something: perhaps the one she’d so
earnestly wanted to help was not him but herself.
How often does this happen, huh?
Margaret Kochamma from God of Small Things
♠♥♣♦
Perhaps the only things he truly loved were his images—those he’d filmed, or
then again, perhaps only those he had yet to film. The first time she went
to one of his exhibitions, after they were married, she was taken aback; she
couldn't believe that this man, who had looked as though he might be about
to collapse, had carted his camcorder around all these various places, with
all the difficulties that must have involved. Indeed, it was hard for her
even to imagine how he’d managed to negotiate to be allowed to film in
sensitive places, the courage and sheer nerve he must at times have had to
display, the patient perseverance that seemed so at odds with everything she
knew about him. What it all came down to was that she just couldn't believe
he’d been sufficiently passionate about the project to put himself through
all that.
looooool. I imagine there's some projection here. Mami and Papi
conversation: "you!?"
"Mami and Papi conversation" refers to a conversation I'd had that week, where I
tried to explain a funny dynamic to my parents, which I'll now try to explain
here:
I'm very lucky with how my career ended up. It's a level of professional success
I never would have imagined for myself. But over the last 15 years, I've known
(and dated) very hungry, ambitious people, people who "play the game" and would
never blog, or tweet, or exist like I do. One ex was such a Hungry Career
Person, and described me: "I've never known someone who could see, navigate,
and manipulate so many interpersonal power dynamics and chooses not to leverage
it, for reasons I can't understand." From her telling: I could walk into a
party, identify the power brokers, say exactly what they wanted to hear to trust
me as an intelligent person and satisfy their needs, but instead I just... leave
them alone and hang out with the nerds. It's like walking down a sidewalk
covered with $20's on the ground and being like "nah, I'm fine; I've got enough
for the burrito I'm buying later. And whoever's money that is: they might want
it back!"
So when I meet Hungry Career People — people who gravitate towards and tend to
agree with the rich and powerful, without thinking at all that maybe they do
this because those people are rich and powerful — and they see me not do
that, in fact they hear me criticize power in stark and rude terms; well after
they hear I've done pretty well actually, there's often a moment of incredulity,
disbelief, and a rash of anger: "you!? You!?!? But you don't even care!!"
I suppose I'm describing perceived dissatisfaction for not being taken
seriously, or respected, for most of my career by people who are "in the arena."
And I think my reductive description, calling them "gravitating towards money
and power because..." may be a sour grapes response, or defensive or insecure,
or a perfectly healthy expression of how I feel and view the world since I do
note their eyes glaze over me when I'm a little too Free Spirit for them. I
really don't know!
But back to the passage: In-hye clearly doesn't take her husband seriously. And
not for nothing, he's absent as a father and treats her like shit too. But when
she sees what he's actually capable of, there's a similar incredulity. "You!?
You could do something... impressive?!? But you're a worm!"
♠♥♣♦
Part 3
Above all, that terrible thing that her own husband had done to Yeong-hye,
that thing she wanted to put as far from her mind as possible, couldn't she
have talked him out of it, found a way to make him change his mind before
the whole thing descended into a cheap, tawdry scandal? The lives of all the
people around her had tumbled down like a house of cards—was there really
nothing else she could have done?
Crying at Freezing Woman
Freezing Woman is an event (geddit? instead of Burning Man?) I went to months
after the ending of my longest relationship, the one I bought a ring for. I
sobbed outwardly, loudly, with someone very close to me, asking "how the hell
did we let it get to this?," remembering all that my ex and I'd built. I could
see the sequence of events, I was even there for them, but no matter how much I
played them back, it didn't make sense that this was the present, one where
we'd broken up, and there was no path back.
I imagined In-hye felt like this. It's a powerful and specific sadness.
♠♥♣♦
The next instant, an unbroken stream of invective starts pouring forth from
the woman’s mouth. Seemingly well accustomed to her cursing, the man pays no
attention as he gets the medical insurance certificate out of his wallet and
slides it under the window at the reception desk. “Wicked little shits! I
won’t be satisfied even when I've sucked your insides dry! I’m going to
emigrate. I can’t spend another day with shits like you!” If the process of
admittance is completed in time, the woman will probably end up spending the
night in the secure room. More than likely, her limbs will be bound and a
tranquilizer will be administered. In-hye stares at the garish
flower-patterned hat worn by this shrieking woman. All of a sudden, she
realizes how blasé she’s become when it comes to the mentally ill. In fact,
after all these visits to the hospital, sometimes it’s the tranquil streets
filled with so-called “normal” people that end up seeming strange.
Christ.
It becomes blasé in the moment, but you pay for it later. Stories like this
provoke such deep sadness in me.
Being in those halls, you remember that Life doesn't have an author, or in any
rate one you can conceive of and ask questions to.
I was exposed to this a lot when Annalisa was recovering from her illness.
Thanks for the read! Disagreed? Violent
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