Rating: 5/5, excellent
Have you ever felt like a book was written specifically for you?
That’s how I felt reading Han Kang’s Man Booker Prize-winning novel, The Vegetarian. I’ve been a vegetarian on and off over the years, and depressed sometimes, and I feel a kinship with Yeong-hye, the protagonist of this book.
Yeong-hye is a young Korean woman who has recurring dreams about dead animals. These dreams lead her to become a vegan in real life, a choice which alienates her family. In Korean society, conspicuous consumption of meat is a display of wealth, and rejecting that expectation is almost unthinkable.
The Vegetarian is a short book (around 190 pages), divided up into 3 sections that portray Yeong-hye’s veganism in a different way: in the first section, her veganism is shown as strange and humorous, in the second it’s strange and erotic, in the third it’s strange and self-destructive.
In each section, it is “strange”. Han Kang rarely allows us glimpses into Yeong-hye’s psyche, rarely shows us her point of view, instead allowing us to see her mainly through how others react to her. I’ve seen some reviewers critique this as a flaw, but I think she’s making a point about the unknowability of people. Han Kang writes from the husband’s perspective, the lover’s perspective, and the sister’s perspective, but leaves Yeong-hye’s perspective mysterious.
I think sometimes fiction can give us a false sense that other people are rational and like us, when in reality people are never perfect and one human can never really grasp another person’s soul. All of the characters in The Vegetarian remain a little bit cold, a little bit aloof to reader sympathy. All of the characters do irrational things, and the narrative doesn’t try to force them to make sense.
The Vegetarian understands that all humans are a little bit cruel, and a person who is completely free of cruelty is one who has given up her humanity.
The Vegetarian is not really pro-vegetarian or pro-carnivore, it’s just an exploration of the issue. You could come away thinking “Striving to do no harm is the only moral way to live” or “Trying to do no harm at all is impossible”, depending on how you interpret the ending. Yeong-hye ends up losing touch with reality and it’s one of those books where the society thinks the main character is insane, when really she’s just different. It is society’s reaction to Yeong-hye that causes her to try to escape into madness.
I don’t want to talk about it too much because I don’t want to spoil anything, but I’d highly recommend reading the book, especially if you’re a vegetarian, a woman, interested in books about mental health, and like dark literary fiction with some horror elements. This book is HEAVY, so if you can’t handle blood, guts, animal abuse, depictions of mental illness, rape… you might want to skip this one.
And if you don’t like to read, there’s also a movie version which is not quite as good in my opinion, but is probably more faithful to the source than the English translation (some people were saying the English translation was too ornate and Western in its prose, the movie is more simple… but I love purple prose, so… yeah). But you can watch it to get the jist of the plot.
Anyway, there are so many things that this book expresses which I feel like I can’t say in words… that’s why I really admire this one and would say it’s my favorite read of 2017. 🙂
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