Tag: weird fiction

Challenging, surreal, character-driven novel with dark psychological themes and powerful imagery. In this three-part story, the author explores the ripple effect of an act of rebellion in an authoritarian environment through the conflicts in a single family. Deeply unsettling. At times, it felt like a horror novel rooted in a dream-like reality. Translated into English from the original Korean. I received this book from Penguin Random House in exchange for an honest review. This title will be released on February 2, 2016.

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.

Yeong-hye and her husband lived an ordinary life, until one day she throws out all the animal products in the kitchen and declares herself a vegetarian. She offers little explanation for her change in eating habits, except that she had a haunting dream. A simple act becomes an extraordinary act of rebellion in a culture where conformity is expected and admired. Gentle scolding turns into violence, as her family attempts to impose their will on Yeong-hye. She refuses to abdicate her newly found bodily autonomy, much to the annoyance of those around her. What follows is a descent into madness and a complete loss of self, while the family ties completely disintegrate.

Time was a wave, almost cruel in its relentlessness as it whisked her life downstream, a life which she had to constantly strain to keep from breaking apart.

The book is short in length (192 pages) and is a quick read, but the subject matter is extremely heavy. I was glad for the short length because it is difficult to read along as Yeong-hye endures invasive transgressions against her body, [spoiler]even when there is very little physical body left.[/spoiler] The book touches on many issues that will be sensitive for some readers (vague keywords follow): [spoiler]marital rape, child abuse, eating disorders, animal abuse, and mental illness.[/spoiler]

Life is such a strange thing, she thinks, once she has stopped laughing. Even after certain things have happened to them, no matter how awful the experience, people still go on eating and drinking, going to the toilet and washing themselves – living, in other words. And sometimes they even laugh out loud. And they probably have these same thoughts, too, and when they do it must make them cheerlessly recall all the sadness they’d briefly managed to forget.

The central character, Yeong-hye, is shown primarily through the eyes of her family, but there are some italicized sections that give insight into her thoughts. There are three acts from three points of view: her husband, her brother-in-law and her sister (In-hye). [spoiler]The men in her life view Yeong-hye as an object who is supposed to play a specific role. Her father is an authoritarian who uses violence to maintain order. Her repressed husband sees her as a submissive wife with no discernible personality or interests outside of him. (“And so it was only natural that I would marry the most run-of-the-mill woman in the world. As for women who were pretty, intelligent, strikingly sensual, the daughters of rich families – they would only ever have served to disrupt my carefully ordered existence.”) Her brother-in-law develops a creepy sexual obsession with her and sees her as a blank canvas on which to project his sexual desires. (“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.”)
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“She was no longer able to cope with all that her sister reminded her of. She’d been unable to forgive her for soaring alone over a boundary she herself could never bring herself to cross, unable to forgive that magnificent irresponsibility that had enabled Yeong-hye to shuck off social constraints and leave her behind, still a prisoner. And before Yeong-hye had broken those bars, she’d never even known they were there.”

Yeong-hye’s actions have a huge ripple effect on her family, though much of that has to do with their rigid mindset and disproportionate reaction which pushes her further into isolation and madness. More lines are crossed as the novel continues and the family bonds almost completely disappear. It is clear why traditionalists maintain such a stronghold on rules and customs, as the rebellion shines a light on the possibilities and lights a spark in others. The saddest part is In-hye’s section. In-hye realizes she never took the time to understand her sister or truly listen to her. She reflects on how her own self-absorption and survival mechanisms have impacted her sister and she experiences guilt over the potential she had to prevent Yeong-hye’s complete break from reality. She begins to see herself in her sister and recognizes how tenuous her own grasp to reality is. How much relentless abuse can one person absorb before they snap? (“If her husband and Yeong-hye hadn’t smashed through all the boundaries, if everything hadn’t splintered apart, then perhaps she was the one who would have broken down, and if she’d let that happen, if she’d let go of the thread, she might never have found it again.”)[/spoiler]

Knowledge of Korean culture would be helpful and add another layer to the novel, but many of the themes are universal. At times, passages about the destruction of the body from Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates came rushing back to me: “…racism is a visceral experience, that it dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth…You must always remember that the sociology, the history, the economics, the graphs, the charts, the regressions all land, with great violence, upon the body.” and “To awaken [the oppressors] is to reveal that they are an empire of humans and, like all empires of humans, are built on the destruction of the body. It is to stain their nobility, to make them vulnerable, fallible, breakable humans.”

It’s your body, you can treat it however you please. The only area where you’re free to do just as you like. And even that doesn’t turn out how you wanted.

This is not a book I could recommend to everyone. I am certain that I do not have a full understanding of this book and I am still trying to process what I read. I didn’t enjoy it in the traditional sense, but it left me with a lot to think about. I recommend having a few palette-cleanser books on hand to read after this one!

Thought provoking. witty and grotesque novel, jam-packed with rich language and dark humor.

“I felt a prickle in my phantom pinkie finger, a keening of imaginary blood. I felt a pain deep in the bone. As I ached for this lost part of myself, my missing finger became a synecdoche for all lost things in my life—women and mothers, youth and full-scalp coverage, soberness, and the bliss of solid sleep. Most of all, I ached for the future as a shimmering, distant thing.”

Romie Futch is a South Carolina taxidermist and total slacker who is down on his luck and still pining for his ex-wife. While surfing the web one evening, he spots an ad from the Center for Cybernetic Neuroscience that might be a solution to all of his problems. They are providing monetary compensation to test subjects who are willing to “undergo a series of pedagogical downloads via direct brain-computer interface.” Romie and other ne’er-do-wells agree to be part of this human experimentation, in hopes of financial reward and maybe a better life.

Romie returns home with an extensive knowledge of the humanities and a motivation to delve into taxidermy art, a creative outlet he abandoned after high school. He becomes obsessed with mutant animals, especially an enigmatic boar nicknamed Hogzilla. These results of animal experimentation are grotesque and a little revolting, as are Romie’s dioramas!

Armed with new knowledge and a drive to create, will the new and improved Romie Futch be able to get his life together and win back his ex-wife? Do artificial intellectual or physical enhancements change who we are or our deepest motivations? Not really. (Right now, I am thinking of the scene in the bar with enhanced humans; Ned received a 21-year old’s heart and a month later decided to celebrate his new heart “by eating a pound of fried bacon.”) Think of impact of the Internet, all of human knowledge available at our fingertips.

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…I’d picked my lot voluntarily, while the men surrounding me had fought battles against tobacco and diabetes, the Southern diet and alcoholism, carcinogenic pollutants and Vietnam-era hand grenades, not to mention the inevitable entropy of the mortal body–the slow smokeless burning of decay. Yet we all dragged our cyborgian carcasses across the trashed planet every day. We all chased various forms of intoxication, hoping to soothe our savage souls. I could see myself some twenty years hence, a gray-haired troll slumped on a barstool, my nose a bulbous mess of clotted capillaries.”

Julia Elliot constructed a strange, complex and somewhat nauseating world steeped in weirdness. A thick layer of grit and grease hangs over every scene. I pictured the setting and people as somewhere between Deliverance and Tucker & Dale vs. Evil.

It did take me longer to read this book than Anna Karenina! The pages would fly by while I was reading it, but the writing is so dense and punchy that I was mentally exhausted after each session. Julia Elliot uses such rich language and the story is jam-packed with macabre descriptions, strong action verbs and witty, darkly humorous word play. It may have been overwrought if by another author’s pen, but the writing style suits this “southern gothic tall tale.”

Random excerpt as an example of the writing style:

Trippy was troubled but still witty somehow, still rattling off streams of purple verbiage that was wine to my parched ears. We compared notes on blackouts, and dreams, hallucinations and synesthetic episodes, uncanny sensations and acute deja vu. Trippy, too, had suffered bouts of feverish, visionary creativity. He’d spent most of his post experiment time in his sister’s Atlanta basement, sawing at his cello, noodling on a thrift-store Casio, composing experimental pieces that he recorded on an eight-track analog Tascam.

“Started off sober,” he said, “sipping home-brewed kombacha, an ancient Chinese elixir concocted from fermented green tea. Then I upped the ante with bhang tea and goji wine, which had my ass tripping old school, heat in my flow, game in my tunes. Spent the wee hours grooving to the likes of Alfred Schnittke, Lindsay Cooper, and Sun Ra, constellations exploding inside my soul, white dwarves collapsing into pulsars, black holes evaginating into white-hot universes, dog. I was on a fucking roll.”

The description from the back: A young wife’s new job in an enigmatic organization pits her against the unfeeling machinations of the universe.

The Beautiful Bureaucrat is a weird and interesting little book with a strange cast of characters and eerie settings. Josephine and her husband begin mind-numbing database entry jobs that turn out to be anything but ordinary! I felt a sense of foreboding throughout the entire book, as if there was something ominous lurking behind the bare, stained walls. It was like traversing a surreal, Kafkaesque nightmare.

Still, the distance between four o’clock and five o’clock, between 148 files and 166 files, often felt interminable. Sometimes, in the depths of the afternoon, Josephine would have a thought–an intense, riveting thought, incongruous with her current task and location, something she ought to share with Joseph, a hint of a scene from a dream or a forgotten memory from when she was a kid, a complicated pun or a new conviction about how they ought to live their lives–then the moment would pass and the thought would be lost, trapped forever between the horizontal and vertical lines of the Database. She’d spend the rest of the workday mourning the loss, resenting the jail cell from which her thought would never escape.

I like how Josephine’s appearance deteriorates as the unfeeling gears of bureaucracy seem to grind at her soul. The antagonists aren’t your typical bad-to-the-bone villains, but are “just doing their job.” The chirpy lack of humanity is terrifying! It is only 177 pages and it reads like a fast-paced thriller, so it only took a few hours to read.
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Only he had stood on street corners beside her and their piled detritus. Only their two minds in the entire universe contained the same specific set of images: a particular pattern of shadow on the ceiling above a bed, a particular loop of highway ramp circled just as a song about a circle began to play on the radio. Tens of thousands of conversations and jokes. Without him she was just a lonely brain hurtling through space, laughing quietly to itself.

The frequent word plays got a little irritating to read, because they seemed so non-sensical and the sheer amount of them really broke the flow of the narrative. But I think the word games were a source of comfort to Josephine, as her world as she knew it seemed to be disintegrating. It also set up the “file” realization, but that was a little cheesy. I did expect [spoiler]a little bargaining at the end, which didn’t happen.[/spoiler]

I really liked this book, but I am sucker for stories where really weird things happen to extremely ordinary people with mundane, monotonous lives. I also have an affection for vague settings and odd characters that are only identified by a single characteristic or job title! If you liked this book or if even if you you just like the concept, you might want to try out Jose Saramago (All The Names especially and Death With Interruptions). Warning: He is stingy with periods! I also thought about these movies as I was reading: The Adjustment Bureau (based on a short story by Phillp K. Dick), Stranger than Fiction and Enemy (based of The Double by Saramago).