The Vegetarian

You know that feeling of having a piece of meat stuck in your teeth? And you keep twisting your lips and your tongue trying to discreetly get it out? That’s a bit how I felt after finishing this book. My mind kept running over the details of it. It’s a heavy read for such a light book. It’s unsettling. It lodges itself in your brain. What seems like such a simple decision — the decision to refuse meat — is slowly unraveled and as you read, you realize it’s really not a simple decision at all. Fans of The Yellow Wallpaper will really like this one.

Finished The Vegetarian this weekend. It reminded me a lot of a book I read a few years ago called Hunger by Knut Hamsun, which was written in the late 1800s. Both are quite creepy (and very literary), but they’re also both beautifully written, psychology-driven stories.

Told in three-parts, from the perspectives of the main character’s husband, brother-in-law, and sister, ‘The Vegetarian’ is much more complex than the title may have you presume. It’s a short, intense read, the story of a young Korean woman’s decision to become vegetarian and how this seemingly small act transforms her life and those of her family members. It touches on heavy themes like subversion, violence, death, power, mental illness, abuse, and sexual assault.

This book won the Man Booker International Prize in 2016, and we English-speakers have Deborah Smith, the translator, to thank for giving us access to this poignant story. The insider’s peek into Korean culture is part of what makes ‘The Vegetarian’ so striking — though I’d suggest readers be cautious not to allow that perspective to take over their appreciation of the work as art in itself.

Rich with symbolism and parable, this novella is worth reading carefully, then discussing with others. During my feminist book club’s discussion — a group with much in common, all of us Westerners, native English-speakers, and women — many of us were surprised that we missed details others had seen as important. The experience of reading ‘The Vegetarian’ was definitely made richer by talking about it!

I’ve never wanted a good book to end so badly. At just 188 pages, Lang’s novel is brief but bursting with anxiety and fear. With some scenes bordering on the grotesque, Kang tells the story of a Korean woman who has nightmares about blood and meat and so becomes a vegetarian, against the accepted norms of her family. Told in three parts, all from perspectives of other characters in her life, Kang explores the role terrible men play in the lives of women, controlling patriarchal customs, and most affectingly, the cascading consequences of abusive parents. A bizarre and visceral experience. One that will be hard to forget and not easy to stomach.

The New York Times Book Review named The Vegetarian one of the best ten books for 2016. The novelist, Han Kang, who has won the Man Booker International Prize among others, demonstrates her beautiful command of language, even in translation from the Korean by Deborah Smith. Kang also reveals a deep engagement with the dark side of the psyche. The publisher’s blurb describes the novel as “a darkly allegorical, Kafkaesque tale of power, obsession, and one woman’s struggle to break free from the violence both outside and within her.” Simply put (over-simply), the plot is this: A Korean woman, who is part of an avid meat-eating family, becomes a vegetarian without any explanation to that family, prompting extreme reactions from them, which drive her to increasingly bizarre behavior and finally to the breaking point.

Kang structures her narrative in three parts, each told from a different point of view, none of which is the novel’s protagonist. This technical choice creates emotional distance between the reader and the vegetarian, a distance that heightens a sense of the vegetarian as “other.” In Part I, “The Vegetarian,” the protagonist’s husband narrates in first-person, past tense. “Before my wife turned vegetarian, I’d always thought of her as completely unremarkable in every way.” But she is suddenly remarkable, and he is baffled by her strength. In Part II, “Mongolian Mark,” Kang uses third-person limited, past tense narrative, offered through the perspective of the protagonist’s brother-in-law, a visual artist. His obsession with her, focused on a family birthmark, leads him to drag her into his bizarre artistic vision. Part III, “Flaming Trees,” is presented again in third-person limited narrative, but in present tense, through the perspective of the protagonist’s sister. The present tense narrative offers a sense of immediacy tempered again by emotional distance. Kang inserts into the husband’s narrative in Part I, and only there, a half dozen brief italicized glimpses into the vegetarian’s thoughts—violent, grotesque snapshots of nightmare and memory. The transitions are sudden and stark, offered with little or no context.

Each of the three points of view attempts to move closer to the emotional center of the story, probes the psyche of the protagonist, but cannot reach any level of understanding. The narrative points-of-view resist the opening of the heart of the vegetarian, who cannot tell her own story. In the end, readers are left with a world that resists their own understanding but pulls at their sense of an individual crushed by the demands of a world that has no place for the assertion of self.

I did not care for this book. It was sad, depressing, and it seemed to go nowhere.

This book was a little strange and frightening but very interesting.

A dark, deeply psychological character study that mixes contemporary feminist politics and the ancient struggles of fitting in versus standing out

We read this for book club and none of us got the point. We usually after discussion walk away with a good understanding of what we’ve read but this one left us with more questions than answers.

I still can’t get over this book. I think I will reread it. I can’t help but think that this is somewhat of a political allegory. Very sad.

Irene Gordon