Review by kitten_nuisance - The Hole

kitten_nuisance 's review for:

The Hole by Hye-young Pyun

2.0

reflective slow-paced

Plot or Character Driven: A mix

Strong character development: No

Loveable characters: No

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

Sorry to report that I found this very boring, and the whole garden thing doesn't really appear until over halfway through the book. I would have been fine with a different but interesting plot that was not about the big hole in the garden! But this plot trickles out the tiniest drop of information to you, spending far more time on day to day tedium of Oghi's life and random occurrences therein. I swear that I can take a slow-paced literary novel, and was not expecting this to be a "thriller" in the 2024 American sense, but there has to be the barest hint of interest to grasp onto in said slow-paced novel.

I do not understand how this is about being "forced to face trauma," as I have seen it described on other sites? I suppose it forces him to face the trauma he himself inflicted! In this GoodReads blurb, it says that "he discovers the difficult truth about his wife and the toll their life together took on her." He cheated on her, and he repeated the exact thing her father was disgraced for (this is never gone into for some reason??). He knew that he had done that; he didn't need to discover it. In the latter half to 25%, the book begins to hint to us that she knew what he did. It also begins to hint that Oghi and his mother in law may not have been related anymore if his wife had lived, so we get a pretty good idea there of where the chips fell. But then at the very end, the book decides to tell us that the wife knew everything, wanted a divorce, and caused the accident. So from the beginning of the book, Oghi knew the toll his choices had taken on her. He is not discovering anything! Maybe he shouldn't have done those things and just expected his wife to be cool with it or not find out. I don't understand why I spent my time reading about this man or am supposed to care what happened to him? It would have been far more interesting to read about the wife, who had a lot of fascinating traits.

Content Warnings