Giving this 3.5 rounded up.
This book wasn’t for me, I didn’t hate reading it, I just didn’t look forward to it when I had to take breaks. ( )

3 1/2 stars and rounding to 4 since I don't think I've uncovered all the layers here.

This book has so many layers that I'm not sure I could ever uncover them all. The comparisons to Misery and The Vegetarian is what got my attention and while there are similarities I'm not sure that's a fair assessment. This is for sure a thriller, but it's not violent or gory or heart-pounding. It's terrifying on a more psychological level I think. I mean, waking up from a coma after a horrible car accident where you lost your wife and realizing your only salvation/caretaker/family left is your MIL? That's enough to drive any normal human into a dark hole. This is Oghi's descent into all the holes.

While The Hole does refer to a literal hole it also is referenced a few different times in other ways. Oghi has a hole in the middle of his life, he is alone and falling into a hole of despair, he references his favorite map that has a hole in the middle of it from a compass. I mean, the cover is beautiful and hits the bullseye when it comes to describing this story.

“To be human was to be saddled with emptiness.”

“The world's oldest map, the Babylonian Map of the World, had a little circle bored through the center. [...] 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.”

"So that's what I'll do. What my daughter couldn't. What she meant to do. What she wanted to do. I have to do it for her. And I will." ( )

A man of no particular virtue is left mostly paralyzed after an auto accident in which his wife died. A badly damaged jaw prevents his speaking and his mother-in-law is his only living relation. Things are bad enough, but they get worse. Rather depressing. Fortunately it isn't long, though it's too long. ( )

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: Winner of the 2017 Shirley Jackson Award
Named One of the Top 10 Thrillers to Read This Summer by Time Magazine.

In this tense, gripping novel by a rising 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, award-winning author Hye-young Pyun's 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.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: First, read this:

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.
–and–
Oghi looked lovingly on his wife’s shallow vanity. She knew exactly what her goals were, and though she believed in them, she failed at nearly everything she set out to do. Yet she brushed off each failure, hardly any worse for the wear. Then quickly found herself a new role model and extolled their virtues ad nauseam. By doing so, she seemed to come to an understanding of the difference between longing and ambition.

Poor, crippled Oghi has survived a horrific car crash only to be confined to his head. He can barely communicate. He is cluaustrophobically trapped in a nightmare of dependence on others for his existence...a man accustomed to being the center of power in his own life and the delineator of Reality itself (he was a cartographer in his previous existence).

Ironic, that...as a mapmaker he relies on others to provide him data so he can graphically represent reality, yet he was completely and utterly uninterested in learning any single thing about his now-dead wife. I'd be surprised if he could describe her knees or fingers, things marital partners know very intimately about their spouse. He certainly took no trouble to learn a single thing about her wants and needs.

While this all sounds pretty tediously familiar to a generation raised on feminist screeds against the awfulness that is Man, it manages not to be the same old, same old by giving us enough of her thoughts by proxy. Oghi remembers things she said, or did; it's more than enough to reveal to the reader the depths of this man's appalling sense of entitlement to all his wife's energy and attention with no hint of reciprocation. As this is clearly something not reserved for his wife (his career success is clearly down to cheating and chicanery), we learn from his own memories he is that worst of all possible characters: the skilled manipulator of the feelings and needs of others, the sociopath.

This is a novella, so it won't eat your time making its effect on you any less powerful with foreshadowing. It's memorably, involvingly written and translated. It offers no moral uplift, or hint of redemption. Instead it breathes life into the very essence of its titular...object, subject, shape, space?...as well as, with its condign ending, gives us schadenfreude lovers of the world a huge chuckle.

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.

( )

I enjoyed reading this book and I thought the translation into English was well done. I speak Korean conversationally at a minimum and I am familiar enough with texts translated into English from Korean that I have seen all the ways it can go wrong.

It was at times riveting and also slightly horrifying....kind of along the lines of Misery as described in the blurb but it is not Misery and does not, at least to me, feel like a Korean author copying Stephen King. It is its own story and a well done one at that and I would hope to read other books by Hye-Young Pyun.

There is nothing supernatural going on here...there is no blood and gore...there are no monsters from the underworld. This is a story of a deteriorating marriage and a horrible accident and a severely disabled man left to be taken care of by his mother-in-law. At first, the storyline reminded me of the usual Korean themes from dramas, overused and corny. I was pleasantly surprised, however as the story slowly winds its way to an unforeseen ending, or perhaps, long foreseen ending if you catch all the hints along the way.

I say no more. ( )