The Invisible Hotel

living with the war and the generational trauma it carries is a sisyphean task and yewon isn't pushing the boulder up the mountain—she is using all her strength to stop it from rolling down and flattening her. every waking moment she is suffocating in the sweltering, claustrophobic agony of the price of war; the dead, the dying, the missing, the mourning, the surviving. she shifts helplessly, without agency, between waking dissociative moments and the dreadful nightmarish landscape of the hotel. each symbolic piece of the story directly constructing the inescapability of the war as a whole and the personal war each person is carrying within them; the bones of her family, the doors to escape the trauma, the windows of hope. this book is an agonizing slog through a waist-high mud pit that the reader feels viscerally. the walls closing in around yewon are palpable. it's deeply terrorizing in a surrealist way, consistently reinforcing the cyclic nature of generational trauma and its manifestations in the families it affects.<br/><br/>if you aren't connecting with the meaning of the invisible hotel, i highly recommend around 20% of the way into the book, reading both olivia ho's review published on "the straits times" and gianni washington's review on the "chicago review of books" to better sort through the symbolism and cultural context you may be missing.