The Vegetarian

*4.5 stars. This book is brutal and bizarre and insightful and sad and the writing is descriptive, yet sparse. It really is a marvel and while I was wrapped in it, it was also difficult to read at times because it was so disturbing. Still, now I'm really looking forward to Human Acts after this.

This book is a perfect example of rating a book a five star even though you found the reading experience disturbing and painful. This book is beautifully written and Deborah Smith's translation is stunning. However the subject matter is deeply disturbing, dark and haunting. This book deals with mental illness, dark dreams, physical and mental abuse and anorexia and a plethora of many other difficult subject matters and the book remains terribly heartbreaking until the very end. This book will upset and haunt me for a long time after finishing it. Nevertheless, I think this book is so powerful and the plot and the characters are so strong. In under 200 pages this book has made me feel a rollacoaster of emotions for all the characters and at many instances this book made me conflicted over who I sympathised with more and to me that makes this book a five star read. I was engrossed in a rather morbid way throughout the plot. I think the structure of the novel was handled so well so that the plot never got too tedious and you never lost the integrity of the tone of the novel. A world class piece of literature to me that certainly deserved the man booker prize award. I certainly will be reading more of Han Kang's works!

Okay first for the good things - I thought the writing was beautiful and vivid, and the translation was excellent!

The book is broken up into 3 sections all told from different points of view- I enjoyed the first, the second was okay but got a bit weird, then the third was just a bit boring to be honest.

I don't know whether this went straight over my head but I just didn't really get the whole point of the 3 different narratives. I did enjoy the first third and if that had continued I suspect it would have been a better book for me but the tone and feel changed in the other 2 sections and I just didn't really enjoy those bits.

I still absolutely praise the translation and writing though - both were excellent!

This book follows the story of a married woman , who in one day wakes up and decides that she wants to become vegetarian . the reason behind that is -Like she says- : She had a dream .
And basically this book is about her life after that , and how that decision affected her and her family .
Its told from the point of view of three people ; her husband , her brother in law and her sister.

It's a very weird book to begin with , you think it's about being a vegetarian and stuff but when you go deep into it , you realize it's not about that at all .
It's about life decisions , making a choice and how your entire life could change because of it .

I didn't fully get the meaning behind it , i think it's one of those books which you have to read more than once to fully get the idea behind it . i would categorize it as a thriller . maybe .

overall i thought this book was really good and i found out that it has a movie adaptation which i can't wait to watch . maybe tonight ! :D



Quotes I Liked :
When a person undergoes such a drastic transformation, there's simply nothing anyone else can do but sit back and let them get on with it.There's nothing wrong with keeping quiet.Perhaps the only things he truly loved were his images—those he'd filmed, or then again, perhaps only those he had yet to film.IF only one's eyes weren't visible to others, she thinks. If only one could hide one's eyes from the world.And my fav :*Or perhaps it was simply that things were happening inside her, terrible things, which no one else could even guess at, and thus it was impossible for her to engage with everyday life at the same time. If so, she would naturally have no energy left, not just for curiosity or interest but indeed for any meaningful response to all the humdrum minutiae that went on on the surface.

Read this one for Women in Translation month, based on the recommendation of The Reading Women podcast.

This was.....dark, unsettling, sometimes horrifying, and always fascinating. Definitely not for everyone, but I'm certain I won't soon forget it.

Read this within a day, because I had the time and because it absolutely captivated me. The story is told in 3 segments, one incredibly intriguing, one incredibly sexy and one incredibly terrifying. From different points of view they tell the story of a woman who follows a dream and converts to radical vegetarianism, which is only the first step in her transformation.

Part Kafka's Die Verwandlung, part Greenaway'sThe Pillow Book, part Sartre's Nauseau.

I hadn't intended to read this in one sitting, but it was too gripping to put down. This book is obtuse and allegorical in really fascinating ways. Certainly a dark novel (my favorite kind), but every word seems purposeful.

Not an easy book. The first part was the best, I think, the rest went progressively more crazy. I read this as a description of a rigid society and the strict roles it imposes on people - both men and women, but especially on women. You can also read notes on art, sexuality, control over one's own body and probably a lot more.

Impressive, interesting, brutal... but not brilliant, not for me.

Beautiful book, dark and frightening. The story of–primarily–sisters and their husbands, there is a lot to love about this book. If I have one quibble, I would say that the primary male characters – both husbands and the father of the sisters, and even their brother– are bastards. This is something I often see in modern novels, usually books by women. Is it how the author feels about men? Still, I thought this was a terrific novel and I will look for more work by this author.

Loved this. Surreal and intense, but not in a “what's going on?” way.

Not at all the book I expected it to be. Like a Murikami, but darker, less optimistic. Very well-written.

I enjoyed reading this book - there was a fairy-tale-esque air about it that I really liked. But there's something about translations from East Asian languages that I've noticed is kind of similar and it didn't quite work for me here. I can never tell if it's the translator or the actual style of the writing but it wasn't totally for me...I never wanted to put it down though and I'm glad I read it.

This was strange and exploratory enough to maintain my attention but lacked, for me, the major slap in the reader's face that reminds them of the truth in humanity and brings the whole thing to a point. This is about a woman's desire to become something other than just a human and she seeks to achieve this by shucking off everything that makes us such. Food, family, connection to other humans, a solid shelter, etc. I think I expected some magical realism here and because I didn't get it, I find the story lacking. I think it was all of the comparisons to Kafka. I don't see that here at all. I really see a sad mental health story instead. I feel bad for vegetarians, as the act of refusing to eat meat is the way Yeong-hye's family comes to pay attention to her long enough to realize something is wrong.

I blame the translation, but there were parts of the (very) short novel that just dragged. The lack of flow in narrative just ripped me right out of the story and I had to force myself through.

Finally, I hung in there for In-hye. She was the character I identified with the most. Her sense of guilt and responsibility rang out as the truest part of the story for me. Poor In-hye. At least she has Ji-woo to bring her some joy, because joy is lacking in this story big time.

This one is not a must read, but it's not a waste of time either. I'm curious to see what may stick with me. I may come back and edit.

There is clearly some level of meaning – allegory, metaphor, something – that I am missing because I know little to nothing about Korean culture. What I took as the core idea, the insanity or not of the wish to give up humanity and become a tree or plant, was intriguing, especially within the family contexts given (abuse, abuse, and more abuse), but I was looking for something beyond that which I did not find.

Full Review: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jdd7NOQ5ciE

This was a strange one, but after taking some time to think about the story, I decided to give this four stars. The story's structure was completely new to me. It's told in three parts. Every part surrounds the character Yeong-hye, but we never get her point-of-view. Instead, we get her husband, her brother-in-law, and finally her sister. I'm not sure what's a spoiler, so I don't want to say too much else. I feel it's important to note that there are many disturbing images throughout this book, so it deserves all the trigger warnings. Sexual assault, eating disorders, mental illness, self harm, copious amounts of blood. The book is short, but it's powerful. There is beautiful writing in here, and I would definitely read this again.

Just finished. Short, potent, distressing. Because of disturbing dreams, Yeong-hye becomes a vegetarian–a vegan, really–to battle the darkness inside herself. The first part of the novel is told from the point of view of her husband, who is really quite a wretched person. He's cold and sexist and can't handle that she won't let him eat meat at home anymore. One could write a feminist thesis on this part alone. She never details her dreams, and he's not that interested. After he tells her family what's been going on, all hell breaks loose.

Part two, we discover that he's divorced her, and that she has spent time in a mental institution, after which she lived with her sister and brother-in-law. The brother-in-law is our main character for this section, and he becomes fixated on Yeong-hye because of her lingering dermal melanocytosis (I totally had to look that up, because it occurs in only roughly 5-10% of white babies, and I'm white). He is a middle-aged artist, a mite dysfunctional, and he dreams of painting her over with flowers and having sex with her. He does this, and it basically ruins him.

In part three, we get the p.o.v. of Yeong-hye's older sister In-hye. This part is particularly heartbreaking, because she is essentially an ideal woman, but her life is falling apart. She is a good cook, a good wife, a good person, looks after her sister, is a devoted mother, and runs her own business. Basically, from what I can tell, with very little appreciation. Her husband leaves her after his fiasco with Yeong-hye and goes into hiding. Yeong-hye is put in a mental institution again and slowly begins to starve herself as she disconnects from everyone and everything around her.

This is not a cheerful novel. But it is awesome in a way that it seems writers like Banana Yoshimoto and Natsuo Kirino are awesome, full of subtle but intense emotion and devastation.

The Vegetarian is a captivating and haunting story told in three parts. First published in Korea in 2007, Han Kang's novel will arrive for English-speaking readers in 2016. Spurred by a dream, Yeong-hye religiously adopts vegetarianism to the horror of her husband and family. Actually, horror may be putting it lightly. Whether Korean culture really is this passionate about their meat eating, or such abuse of Yeong-hye is merely the result of the author's dramatic allegory, I do not know. What I do know is that such extreme responses create the spiral that makes this novel so disturbingly addictive.

Kang (through her translator Deborah Smith) weaves some vivid language and beautiful sentences in this delicate yet brutal tale. The unraveling of Yeong-hye is done so effectively. The reader is given the unraveling, but not the psychology, not the reason. Sure, we're given pieces of the dream, but only in the vaguest of terms and descriptions. Yet this omission forces us readers to see the story as though it were playing out before our eyes. The story is kept brief and wonderfully paced despite the internal dialogue of the three characters narrating the story.

As I read The Vegetarian, I imagined many scenes as they'd play out on film. It's this aforementioned pace and brevity, this lack of internal monologue, that partially makes this happen, but it's also the vividness of the setting and the haunting acts of the story itself. Whether it's made by the Koreans or Japanese or Danish, I suspect I'll see a film adaptation of this novel in the foreign section of the library within three to five years. Yet, having read the book, I feel as though I've already seen the movie—for me, it was that vivid.

So having read two Korean translations I'm entirely capable of passing judgement on a nation's literary output. Apparently Korea is obsessed with guilt in a country where men are assholes.

Yeong-hye is described by her husband in the opening lines as “completely unremarkable in every way” then goes on to eschew meat of all kind. Naturally this leads to her cutting her wrists when her father tries to force meat into her mouth. She later sleeps with her sister's husband after he paints flowers over them both. He tries to leap off the balcony to his death when they are discovered while she decides that she is a tree.

Koreans are crazy.

UPDATE
OK so here's a less glib review of The Vegetarian as it continues to enjoy continued critical acclaim. Perhaps it's more evidence of the quality of the read that it leaves it open to such diverse interpretation - that it's afforded the level of seriousness of many of the review I've seen.

I felt her refusal to eat meat was actually a feminist reaction to the patriarchal Korean culture that still seems mired in the sexist idea that a women's place is in the kitchen. Korea food is centered around “banchan” or multiple side plates that accompany the main course. It's heavy on effort and value judgements are made on the quality and quantity of these dishes. She is railing against the constraints food has placed on her and the expectations that come with it.

Then on to the sexualization of women in section two. Believe it or not, Korea outstrips both Japan and the US for porn consumption. As a culture it still uses sex to sell (think pre Mad Men era advertising in the US for cars, cigarettes etc) There is an obsession with appearance: Korean men wear more makeup then men in any other country. Epicanthic fold surgery is the most common surgery performed by university girls in Korea and nearly 50% of highschool aged girls have had cosmetic surgery done and many will go on to sculpt noses and narrow chins to create a uniform “ideal” face. So maybe I'm just Psych 101'ing the whole thing but the painting is about the objectification of women that has been internalized culturally.

I'm a little lost on the third part. I'm not as clear on the mental health state of the nation. It could be the intense pressure to succeed. The stress of university exams, getting into a chaebol which control 50% of the Korean economy, the martyr worker complex and a fixation on keeping up with appearances. But maybe I'm reaching.