The vegetarian

I picked a great read for my first Korean novella. The Vegetarian won last year's international Man Booker award, and was better the last Man Booker I read, Disgrace.

The prose here loses nothing in translation. I don't think I've read anything like it. If you took away the Benji part of The Sound and The Fury you might have an analog.

The book has three parts, narrated by a different person and centers around the decent of Yeong-hye an ordinary Korean wife who refuses to eat meat and is eventually institutionalized. The first part is told by who husband, who is the least crazy, but also a jerk. The second part Yeong-hye's brother in law who is an artist that lusts after her and is a little crazy. The last part is by her sister, In-hye, the closest to losing it like her sister.

The Sound and the Fury goes in the opposite direction from opaque to clear headed narrators and ends with resolution. The Vegetarian doesn't have a true resolution and leaves more questions open then open. However, both use the decline of a family to make allegorical the decline of a country.
There is certainly more eroticism in The Vegetarian, despite Faulkner's muddy underwear obsession.

The Sound and The Fury is probably a bad comparison, but I do think Han Kang is on the same level as Faulkner, with much clearer prose. That's backed up with the Man Booker, I'm looking forward to her publishing more in English. Han Kang takes on issues of Art, Sexuality, Patriarchy, Violence, Sanity, and Nationalism, just to name a few. The ending suggests there are no clear cut answer to the questions that trouble us most, the questions at the heart of our nature.

This was a difficult read, but I don't for a moment regret having read it.

There is so much going on in this book, so much that is unsaid, so much that is left for the reader to decide. It is a book about men and women—men using women to further their own goals. It is a book about families breaking apart and coming together. It is a book about human connection and the lack thereof.

It is a book about mental health, about a descent into madness. There is a dreamlike quality to it, but the language is precise and objective (often reminding me of Hilary Mantel or Angel Carter). As one of the characters seems to lose her grip on reality, readers find themselves more and more grounded in reality. Strangely, this is unsettling rather than reassuring.

The Vegetarian is beautiful and sad, exquisite and gut-wrenching, terrifying and ultimately redemptive. It is one of those books that will come back to me in those strange moments when images from books I've weave themselves into the threads of my wandering thoughts.

I've seen this book on our hold shelf for weeks and was always struck by the cover. But oddly enough, I never actually picked up the book to read its summary. I was flying blind with this one once it arrived on the hold shelf for me and had absolutely no idea what I was in for with Han King's The Vegetarian.

In part one, we meet Yeong-hye through the narration of her husband, Mr. Cheong, as he observes his wife become increasingly unwell as a result of her gruesome, gory nightmares. One morning, before sunrise, he finds her in the kitchen throwing away all of the meat in their house: eel, beef for shabu shabu, pork belly, and oysters all because she "had a dream." We watch Yeong-hye begin to unravel without the support of her husband, sister, or parents, who see her rapid switch to vegetarianism as a fussy rebellion against the family and not an indicator of something deeply, deeply wrong. Part one climaxes at an intervention-style, meat-centric family dinner, where we watch the family completely fall apart.

Part two is narrated by Yeong-hye's brother-in-law, Yeong-ho, who becomes infatuated with Yeong-hye after his wife, In-hye, tells him that her sister was born with a "Mongolian mark" (a blue, thumb-sized birthmark on her buttocks), which always set her apart. This section of the book feels the most violating-- while we're let into the brutally honest minds of Mr. Cheong and Yeong-hye in part one, we're given an even deeper lens into the predatory, and sad mind of Yeong-ho as he becomes obsessed with Yeong-hye while she's at her most vulnerable.

Part three is the ebb in the tide, narrated by In-hye, Yeong-hye's sister. Although there's plenty of drama left for the last 50 pages, this part seems much more quiet and intimate, and by far the saddest arc of the story. I was so struck by this honest portrayal of grief and guilt, and the difficulty in accepting a life someone has chosen for themselves when it's not something you ever would have chosen for them.

I'm so surprised by how much I love this book; it's such a dark and twisted story ruminating on the intersections of family, violence, abuse, mental illness, societal expectations, gender, power, choice, and food. Similar to movies like The Witch and Antichrist, and books like Universal Harvester and Uzumaki, Han Kang crafts a brutally honest masterpiece of a family in disrepair that we (the readers) feel deeply unsettled while reading, like we've inserted ourselves as active watchers of something we shouldn't be seeing.

There are so many things I'm thinking about after reading this story, and I'm so impressed by Kang's incredible nuance in bringing these questions to the surface. How do we process trauma both inside and outside of ourselves? How do we let people in when we don't always know who they are? Conversely, how do we know when to let people go when they've already made the choice to leave? How does the patriarchy reinforce trauma? How can we have any semblance of control in the spheres of society, family, and even our own brains?

I just... I have no idea what to say about this book. Everyone and everything is just so... I want to say messed up but that doesn't come close to enough. There were so many different things going on with the interconnected characters that I wasn't sure who was more screwed up or mentally ill or abusive or misogynistic.

I have to say that I did enjoy (although I'm not sure that's the right word for it) how the sisters' characters were unfolded. I honestly never had any idea where this book was going from one chapter to the next. There haven't been many books that have made me have visceral reactions the way parts of this book did. So there's that. Noticing the various cultural differences was interesting too. It's definitely not a book that can be understood as much while applying American mores.

Would I recommend it? Not a blanket recommendation, that's for sure. But if you like reading very dark books about dysfunctional families and mental illness, it could be right up your alley. I'm not sorry that I read it but it was a difficult read nearly all the way through.

The Vegetarian is a disturbing and extraordinary novel, about the transformation of a seemingly “unremarkable in every way” woman to a sensual, provocative, ethereal being who has rejected completely the outside world. It is Han Kang’s – a South Korean writer – first novel, wonderfully translated by Deborah Smith, in English (Portobello, 2015).

Haunted by grotesque and aggressive recurring dreams, Yeong-hye decides one morning to become a vegetarian. Her vegetarianism is a shocking act of mutiny in a society that vegetarianism is unusual and societal norms and traditions are strictly obeyed. It provokes an aggressive, violent reaction by her family. The consequences are dire, the main characters are forced to re-examine their own lives and their values, and when finally, the fragile façade disintegrates, the breakdown of the family is inevitable and definitive.

The visions have a very profound effect to Yeong-hye, gradually, she is being transformed to a primitive, almost ethereal being, she becomes a “person who didn’t belong anywhere, someone who had passed into a border area between states of being”, driven by her inner passions and desires.

The Vegetarian consists of three chapters. Yeong-hye is the focal point in all three parts of The Vegetarian, but in each chapter is different. Yeong-hye’s husband, Mr. Cheong, a mediocre, dull person, narrates the first chapter ‘The Vegetarian’. The second chapter, ‘Mongolian Mark’, focuses on Yeong-hye’s brother-in-law (his name remains unrevealed to the reader), an unsuccessful graphic artist who becomes obsessed with Yeong-hye’s thin body, which rather than provoking lust, it was a body that “made one want to rest one’s gaze quietly upon it”. In the third and final chapter, ‘Flaming Trees’, In-hye, Yeong-hye’s sister and successful businesswoman, begins to question her marriage and her relationship with her sister, husband, and father. She is tired, worn down by life, she is failing “to cope with all that her sister reminded her of”.

In this extraordinary, imaginative, unsettling and dark novel, Han Kang explores the primal violent and sensual instincts hidden deep in our unconscious self. In Yeong-hye’s personal rebellion lies a deep despair and doubt about humanity. In a society that hates any form of diversity and individuality, she rejects human violence and male domination by transforming herself into a plant.

http://maquinalectora.net/