The Vegetarian
Han Kang, 2007 (Engl.Trans., Deborah Smith, 2015)
Crown/Archetype
208 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781101906118
Summary
Winner, 2016 Man Booker International Prize
A beautiful, unsettling novel about rebellion and taboo, violence and eroticism, and the twisting metamorphosis of a soul.
Before the nightmares began, Yeong-hye and her husband lived an ordinary, controlled life.
But the dreams—invasive images of blood and brutality—torture her, driving Yeong-hye to purge her mind and renounce eating meat altogether. It’s a small act of independence, but it interrupts her marriage and sets into motion an increasingly grotesque chain of events at home.
As her husband, her brother-in-law and sister each fight to reassert their control, Yeong-hye obsessively defends the choice that’s become sacred to her. Soon their attempts turn desperate, subjecting first her mind, and then her body, to ever more intrusive and perverse violations, sending Yeong-hye spiraling into a dangerous, bizarre estrangement, not only from those closest to her, but also from herself.
Celebrated by critics around the world, The Vegetarian is a darkly allegorical, Kafka-esque tale of power, obsession, and one woman’s struggle to break free from the violence both without and within her. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—November 27, 1970
• Where—Kwangju, South Korea
• Education—Yonsei University
• Awards—(see below)
• Currently—lives in Seoul
Han Kang is a South Korean poet, novelist, and short story writer. The daughter of novelist Han Seung-won, she was born in Kwangju but moved, at the age of 10, to Seoul. She studied Korean literature at Yonsei University and participated in the Iowa Writers' Workshop in the U.S.
Han published her first poems in 1993. Her first novel, Black Year, a mystery about a missing woman, was released in 1998. Around that time, she was introduced to a line from the Korean poet Yi Sang: "I believe that humans should be plants," a line which she interpreted as a defensece against the violence of the colonial period.
The line became an inspiration for "The Fruit of My Woman," Han's short story about a woman who actually turns into a plant. The woman and her husband had had a distant relationship, but once she becomes a plant he puts her in a pot and tends to her lovingly. Han said she wanted to deepen the story, which eventually became The Vegetarian, published in 2007 (English translation, 2015).
(Apparently, she wrote two of the three sections of The Vegetarian by hand: repetitive keyboard strokes had damaged her wrist.)
Han's other Korean novels include, Baby Buddha (a novella, 1999), Your Cold Hand (2002), Breath Fighting (2010), and Greek Lessons (2011).
Baby Buddha and The Vegetarian have been made into films. The latter was one of 14 films, out of 1,000 submissions, to be part of the North American Film Fest's "World Narrative Competition."
Awards
1995 - Hankook Ilbo Excellent Writer's Award for Baby Buddha
1999 - Korean Novel Award
2000 - Today's Young Artist Award (Literature), Ministry of Culture and Tourism
2005 - Yi Sang Literary Award Grand Prize for Mongolian Mark
2010 - Dong-ni Literary Award for Breath Fighting
2014 - Manhae Literary Award
(Author bio adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 2/9/2016.)
Book Reviews
All the trigger warnings on earth cannot prepare a reader for the traumas of [The Vegetarian]…there is no end to the horrors that rattle in and out of this ferocious, magnificently death-affirming novel…. Han's glorious treatments of agency, personal choice, submission and subversion find form in the parable. There is something about short literary forms—this novel is under 200 pages—in which the allegorical and the violent gain special potency from their small packages.
Porochista Khakpour - New York Times Book Reivew
Kang’s subject and tone owe much to Kafka,... delivering the surreal in a calm, almost deadpan way.... [F]or the most part, what makes The Vegetarian appealing is the controlled voice. Whether Yeong-hye is doing something as relatively normal as refusing sweet and sour pork or as outlandish as catching and eating a live bird while naked in a public garden, the voice stays coolly reportorial.... It’s easy to imagine that in a society as restrictive as Kang’s South Korea, this novel could seem especially daring. For Western readers, what’s more shocking is the unapologetic sexism against which the heroine rebels...
Lisa Zeidner - Washington Post
It takes a gifted storyteller to get you feeling ill at ease in your own body. Yet Han Kang often set me squirming with her first novel in English, at once claustrophobic and transcendent… Yeong-hye’s compulsions feel more like a force of nature… A sea like that, rippling with unknowable shadow, looks all but impossible to navigate—but I’d let Han Kang take the helm any time.
Chicago Tribune
Dark dreams, simmering tensions, chilling violence…This South Korean novel is a feast…It is sensual, provocative and violent, ripe with potent images, startling colors and disturbing questions…Sentence by sentence, The Vegetarian is an extraordinary experience… [It] will be hard to beat.
Guardian (UK)
This is an odd and enthralling novel; its story filled with nihilism but lyricism too, its writing understated even in its most fevered, violent moments. It has a surreal and spellbinding quality, especially in its passage on nature and the physical landscape, so beautiful and so magnificently impervious to the human suffering around it.
Arifa Akbar - Independent (UK)
This short novel is one of the most startling I have read… Exciting and imaginative…The author reveals how nature, sex and art crash through this polite society…It is the women who are killed for daring to establish their own identity. The narrative makes it clear it is the crushing pressure of Korean etiquette which murders them…[A] disturbing book.
Julia Pascal - Independent (UK)
Shocking...The writing throughout is precise and spare, with not a word wasted. There are no tricks. Han holds the reader in a vice grip...The Vegetarian quickly settles into a dark, menacing brilliance that is similar to the work of the gifted Japanese writer Yoko Ogawa in its devastating study of psychological pain...The Vegetarian is more than a cautionary tale about the brutal treatment of women: it is a meditation on suffering and grief. It is about escape and how a dreamer takes flight. Most of all, it is about the emptiness and rage of discovering there is nothing to be done when all hope and comfort fails....A work of savage beauty and unnerving physicality.
Irish Times (UK)
The Vegetarian is a book about the failures of language and the mysteries of the physical. Yet its message should not undermine Han’s achievement as a writer. Like its anti-protagonist, The Vegetarian whispers so clearly, it can be heard across the room, insistently and with devastating, quiet violence.
Joanna Walsh - New Statesman (UK)
[A] strange and ethereal fable, rendered stranger still by the cool precision of the prose… What is ultimately most troubling about Yeong-hye’s post-human fantasies is that they appear to be a reasonable alternative to the world of repression and denial in which everyone around her exists.
Times Literary Supplement (UK)
A complex, terrifying look at how seemingly simple decisions can affect multiple lives...In a world where women’s bodies are constantly under scrutiny, the protagonist’s desire to disappear inside of herself feels scarily familiar.
VanityFair.com
Indebted to Kafka, this story of a South Korean woman's radical transformation, which begins after she forsakes meat, will have you reading with your hand over your mouth in shock.
Oprah Magazine
The Vegetarian is the first—there will be more, let’s hope—of Han Kang’s novels to arrive in the United States…The style is realistic and psychological, and denies us the comfort that might be wrung from a fairy tale or a myth of metamorphosis. We all like to read about girls swapping their fish tails for legs or their unwrinkled arms for branches, but—at the risk of stating the obvious—a person cannot become a potted bit of green foodstuff. That Yeong-hye seems not to know this makes her dangerous, and doomed.
Harper’s
The Vegetarian is incredibly fresh and gripping, due in large part to the unforgettable narrative structure... Han Kang has created a multi-leveled, well-crafted story that does what all great stories do: immediately connects the unique situation within these pages to the often painful experience of living.
Rumpus
You may think you know where Han's English-language debut novel is going, but you have no idea.... This is a horror story in its depiction of the unknowability of others.... It's also a decidedly literary story for its exploration of despair, inner unrest, and the pain of coming to understand yourself....ingenious, upsetting, and unforgettable. —Gabe Habash, Deputy Reviews Ed.
Publishers Weekly
[A] spare, spectacular novel, in which a multigenerational, seemingly traditional Seoul family implodes. Yeong-hye, the youngest of three adult children...stop[s] eating meat; eventually, she eschews everything but water.... Family dysfunction amid cultural suffocation is presented with elegant precision, transforming readers[un]able to turn away. —Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon, Washington, DC
Library Journal
Yeong-hye's...decision [not to eat meat] is sudden and rigid, inexplicable to her family and a society where unconventional choices elicit distaste.... [D]etails that are nearly fantastical in their strangeness to cut to the heart of the very human experience of discovering that one is no longer content with life as it is.... [M]esmerizing...and deeply disturbing.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Also, consider these LitLovers talking points to help start a discussion for The Vegetarian...then take off on your own:
1. What is the relationship between Yeong-hye, "the most ordinary woman in the world," and her husband, Mr. Cheong. Why is her refusal to eat meat, so shocking to him?
2. The novel is structured in a tryptic format, with each section narrated by a family member who reacts to and interacts with Yeong-hye. As the three narrators confront her deepening madness, each also comes face to face with his/her own desires. What do they each come to understand about themselves and what they want from life? In what way are they transformed?
3. Talk about the way in which the author positions Yeong-Hye's vegetarianism—as a feminist choice and revolt against patriarchy. Are there another way to look at it?
4.The book is suffused with a mix of sex and violence. Do you find the physicality disturbing, shocking, repulsive, or something else? Why is there so much sex and brutality in this work; what might its purpose be?
5. What are your feelings about vegetarianism? Do you know vegetarians, or are you yourself one? What are the reason for eschewing meat? Is it a matter health, morality, religion, or basic distaste? If you are a meat eater, do you sometimes feel like the dinner acquaintance in the novel, who comments: "I'd hate to share a meal with someone who considers eating meat repulsive, just because that's how they themselves personally feel....don't you agree?"
6. Trace the stages of Yeong-hye's state of mind. Talk about her thoughts and the language which reflects them—as the passages range from journal-like entries to disconnected, abstract, almost impressionistic images.
7. The novel ends on an ambiguous note. What do you envision as the outcome? What do you think happens to Yeong-hye?
8. What is this book about anyway?
(Questions by LitLovers. Feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)