Woman Eating Claire Kohda | Vampire Literary Fiction
A small piece of advice for anyone who wants to read this book for the first time. Do not pick this up if you have recently moved away for the first time, or gone through some other kind of life-changing event, you will find that the novel hits a little too close to home!
Woman Eating tells the story of a vampire called Lydia who is navigating her life alone for the first time having left her mother in Margate and moved to London. The novel uses vampirism as a metaphor to explore Lydia’s depression and feelings of isolation as she realises that food and eating are a huge part of community and integrating with society.
Firstly I would like to provide some context to this review. When I read this I had recently moved out for the first time and was living with friends instead of family. This meant that it took about twice as long for me to read this novel than it should have done because at times, it felt just too close to the surface for me to carry on. This novel is a small, short and simple novel. There are none of the pretensions that normally come with a ‘literary fiction’ novel. Therefore, I mostly enjoyed my read and found myself engrossed in Lydia’s small portion of life.
Reading it almost felt like watching a YouTube vlog. There wasn’t a great deal of action necessarily, but a lot of the moments of Lydia’s life that we saw were meaningful and helped Kohda create a picture of someone isolated simply by who they were. I have seen many say that this novel did not delve deep enough into the idea of ethnic isolation, but for me, the whole story explored that simply by showing Lydia and how she physically could not integrate herself with her new group of friends.
The theme of food was an excellent choice by Kohda too. Food and eating is something that is so integral to all of our lives, it is a community activity more than anything and I think that, by recognising this, and then showing that Lydia could not partake in this huge aspect of people’s lives, it enahnced the feelings of social isolation that she was subject too.
The characterisation of Lydia was well-thought through, her backstory was realistic and it was fairly clear how her past was affecting her present actions. She also felt like a vulnerable character, which is something I have never seen in a vampiric character and I think was an excellent piece of writing by Kohda.
My only complaint about this novel would be the pace. At times, I felt that it was dragging slightly, that Lydia was simply stagnating, doing the same things over and over. Whilst I understand that this is naturally a way of showing her increased isolation and depression, I do not think this was obvious enough to allow me to keep reading through these slow moments without bouts of impatience. Perhaps a little more cutting could have been good.
Overall however, I really enjoyed this unique take on the vampire trope and would absolutely recommend this toothers who enjoy the novels of Eliza Clark and Haruki Murakami.
