Kazuo Ishiguro, A Pale View of Hills (192 pages)

Is she onto something, or is she out of her mind? Is she denying the world, or is she fully embracing it? Han Kang leaves the answers to these questions deliberately vague, and the sign of a great work is its ability to be read by many people and interpreted differently by each one.”Ī metafictional meditation on modernity and memory-and on “the dancer,” showing off for the abstracted “everyone,” the concept of which gets more relevant every day. She basks in sunlight, is painted all over with flowers by her sister’s husband (a not-so-successful artist), and for all intents and purposes, attempts to become a plant. Her withdrawal from culinary delights is mirrored by her withdrawal from the world. The vegetarian begins a slow transformation into vegetable itself-first, she stops eating meat gradually, she stops eating everything. In our list of the best debut novels of the decade, editor Molly Odintz wrote, “Han Kang’s tale begins with a description of a dutiful wife, unusual only in her refusal to wear a bra, whose sudden decision to stop eating meat sends her partner and family into a spiral of confusion, where forcible consumption of meat quickly becomes a metaphor for violation. The Vegetarian has come under scrutiny for its translation, and the accuracy thereof, but since I can only read English, all I know is that whatever came out of the union of Kang and Smith is very, very good. Deborah Smith, The Vegetarian (188 pages) An American epic in miniature, Train Dreams is a visionary portrait of soul untethered from civilization, a man stoically persevering on his own hermetic terms in the face of unimaginable tragedy. Johnson’s spare, strange, elegiac prose conjures a world that feels both ancient and ephemeral, full of beauty and menace and deep sorrow. In our list of the best novels of the decade, editor Dan Sheehan described it as “the incantatory story of a turn-of-the-century logger and railroad laborer, Robert Grainier, who loses his family to a wildfire and retreats deep into the woods of the Idaho panhandle as the country modernizes around him. Johnson’s novella is a shibboleth among a certain kind of reader (and, typically, writer).

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