Jeff (2:56)

Event already, should I just read a Wikipedia article? And to no shade that's a good experience, right? Like that can be very worthwhile.

Rebecca (3:04)

It can raise the question for me of do I need to do homework before I read this book? And I did not do any homework because I didn't want to know again what the event was that Kang was writing to. And I was really pleased how she unfolds it and that it's not a straightforward unfolding of this thing that happened, but that it unfurls over the course of the book. And if I wanted to come away, if I wanted to be able to speak a couple paragraphs at a non existent dinner party about the event, I probably would need to do some wikipediaing.

Jeff (3:39)

Just to make sure you have your head screwed on right about what happened.

Rebecca (3:41)

But I got the broad strokes of the thing and I certainly understand why it was horn horrific and why the characters in the book are experiencing and thinking about the aftermath of it in the way that they are. So that was a really present part of the reading experience for me.

Jeff (3:57)

Yeah, the first half of the book you don't know anything. I mean this tragedy, massacre, horrible sequence of thousands of individual crimes perpetrated in Moss doesn't appear until relatively late in the book. All things considered, a singular reading experience for me. I'm not even sure I just finished it last night because I like to have it fresh in my mind and I'm still processing it. I'm not sure I've had a reading experience that like it. I don't even know that it works in the I liked it vocabulary. Like to come out of the psychological rich thing, you know, it's kind of. We're in the sort of more like did you like Schindler's List? You know, it feels weird to say it that way. I was fascinated by it. I was compelled by it. There's a lot there. There are parts frankly I don't understand. And that could be the point of some of it. It could also be reader Lee failure on my part. There's a lot. There's a lot in this particular book and we can get into all of it. Let's see. On the I'm trying to think of generals, I guess in terms of plot at the very beginning. So I had read this much and I think we even talked about it in an it book situation or winter preview a little bit. Just sort of what's it about. And it is and isn't. What the synopsis kind of was that like this young woman or I don't even. Not sure how old are. I think we're middle 30s, 40s.

Rebecca (5:15)

I think we're like middle to late middle age.

Jeff (5:18)

Yeah, they're grown like they've had some time. They've been on the world for a while, which I guess matters more than anything at this point, rather than specific age. Has been having this dream about a floodplain, tidal area with a bunch of stumps in it. Like hundreds of stumps, these black stumps. That's where we start. And then she's thinking about her life and she's had some sort of horrible. It doesn't sound like violent or criminal, but like her family has fallen apart. Like something's going on with her where she's living by herself in near squalor, starving herself. She's not well. Rebecca.

Rebecca (5:53)

Yeah, it's not going great. There's some. Some ailment we're not totally clear on. Physical, emotional or both. And every day she sits down to write her will. And then kind of like Penelope at the loom, undoing everything she loomed that day, everything she wove, she throws it away and then lives to the next day so that she can do it again. There's a great, I thought, beautiful quote that I had underlined where she says I had not reconciled with life, but I had to resume living. Like something has happened where she doesn't want to keep going on. And there's a real tension between the suffering she's experiencing and a desire for the end of that suffering, but also that she doesn't really want to die.

Jeff (6:34)

Yeah, it's not even. It's not suicidal ideation. That's how I read it. It was more like, I just don't know how to continue. Like, I don't want to continue. Exactly. It's not that I don't want to be necessarily, but at some point she kind of comes out of the malaise, at least a little. Like enough to eat rice and take a shower and stuff. And then she gets a text message from an old friend. My geography here is weak, but in a different city, at the very least, it takes some doing to get there. Saying come right. It's elusive, cryptic and disturbing. She goes to find her friend who has had a woodworking accident, nearly cutting off a few fingers on her hand. And I. I daren't wiki the. Is this a real treatment? Every three minutes, the needles. Oh, trigger warnings. It's Just triggers. It's like if they took all the triggers off all the Smith and Wesson's and just put them in a pile. That's what we have here, I should.

Rebecca (7:28)

Say lots of medical traumatic stuff.

Jeff (7:32)

And she's talking with her friend about what's going on in her life. Her friend has her own complicated situation. Living experience, family history. And she asks the main character, I need you to go take care of my bird. It's been a few days and dude's gonna die. I never really thought about how small birds are and how much water they need. And they can't go very long without water. Cause there ain't much to them. Ain't much to a Bird would have been a great show title in the old days. And she undergoes a trek, a sojourn, a quest of a kind to fill the water dish of a bird through.

Rebecca (8:04)

Like a terrible snowstorm in the middle of the sticks.

Jeff (8:06)

Nowhere, outside, nowhere. There's like the last bus with a surly bus driver and she gets lost and like, and she falls into a ravine and she falls into the snow. And I don't, I don't know. We're going to be on spoilers, but I don't think this is spoilers to say that we get to a point where I think it's at this point in hindsight where she's been sleeping in the snow and then gets up that I'm not so sure that everything after that. I can't vouch for the reality of any of it. Rebecca. That's kind of where I have to leave my. This for sure happened on the table.

Rebecca (8:39)

Yeah. And going back and looking at the part like the moments of the book that I had marked, when this main character, when Kyungha goes to the hospital and sees her friend and is recounting that she's been having this dream again. And the dream is related to work they had done together in the past. They used to make documentaries together. They're wondering together, like, what is a dream? What is memory? Where do the two meet and where do they blur? And that's kind of the experience of the whole book. But yeah, everything after she falls into this like frozen. Falls down a hill and into like a frozen creek. Maybe it happens, right? Maybe it, maybe it doesn't.

Jeff (9:18)

Maybe parts of it happen. I mean, we don't know. Like it's not even that binary, right.

Rebecca (9:22)

And there are so many different versions of the. If it didn't all happen, what did or what didn't and how is she dead? Is she Hallucinating. Is it a fever dream? Like, there are. And you don't really know that you're in that land until farther into the book, though. Like, it reads as linear at that point that she has. She has this accident. She, like, spends the night curled up, trying to stay warm outside, and then gets up and somehow makes her way to her friend's house and finds the bird and the bird is dead. And she buries the bird. And it's only after that that weird shit happens and you're like, hold on, wait.

Jeff (10:03)

So I guess this is will be the end of the spoilers about plot, because this, where it matters is like, she's buried this bird. Amma. Is it Ama? There's two birds that. There's only one there. I don't know a lot of talk about how many birds are and what they're doing, but she's buried this bird. Like, we're very careful. We sew it in the thing, we put it in the tin, we put it in the frozen ground. She. She's not doing well and yet gets the shovel out.

Rebecca (10:23)

She's like, bleeding from the face while this happens.

Jeff (10:26)

I think my this is a dream is. I don't know that she could have broken the ground with a shovel in her condition. Like, that's where I'm like, I'm not sure that this is actually possible physically, but we're very clear that the bird is in the ground and then the bird is in the house flying around and fine.

Rebecca (10:39)

Yes.

Jeff (10:39)

And at that point we're like, oh, okay, something else is going on. I really don't want to spoil the rest for people. I mean, I guess at this point we'll say if you care about spoilers. It's super interesting. This is literary fiction doing really interesting stuff. The subject matter is quite difficult. You can see why this is the kind of work the Nobel committee would be interested in. I think that's very clear. Golf. If they're going to say things about basically. Is that right?

Rebecca (11:10)

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