Vegetarian (Kang) - Book Reviews

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