Han Kang "The Vegetarian"
Let's begin fast and furious: I didn’t really take much away from it. Sure, it explores the role of women in Korean patriarchal society—and people in general being trapped and powerless—but that wasn’t new to me. The other ideas felt kind of underdeveloped, the characters got on my nerves, and the plot didn’t exactly pull me in.
Han Kang is the first South Korean woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature (overall), and the second South Korean author to win the Booker Prize—for this novel.
Yeong-hye and her husband live a quiet, ordinary life—until she starts having nightmares. Disturbing dreams filled with blood and violence begin to torment her, and in an attempt to cleanse her mind, she gives up meat entirely. It’s a small act of rebellion, but it cracks open her marriage and triggers a chain of increasingly strange events.
Honestly, I’m not sure it’s the best idea to portray a mentally unstable main character and use her thoughts and actions to try to make a broader statement. To me, the more important theme was how completely indifferent the people around Yeong-hye are—how she turns into a burden or an unhealthy object of desire for everyone else.
As I mentioned earlier, the author gives us a glimpse into the Korean patriarchy, where a woman who suddenly becomes inconvenient or incomprehensible is simply thrown away like garbage—no one even tries to understand or help her. It’s a world where women are expected to constantly please men, fulfill their “wifely duties” no matter what, behave “properly” and “accordingly,” or else—what will people think? Honestly, Korean society feels pretty close to Russian society in that way (and not just in that way).
The whole narrative felt a bit dull—lots of repetition, like constant descriptions of the same birthmark or bare nipples (not sure if that’s supposed to mean something or not—how would I know, I’m not Korean). And the recurring question in my head was: Okay, but where is this going?
I guess I’m already steeped enough in feminism and generally familiar with the problems in Korean and Japanese societies, so this book didn’t really give me anything new to think about. I kept hoping for some kind of answer—even just a philosophical one, not necessarily action—but I didn’t find it. Maybe you did? Let me know if you saw something I missed.
So, in my personal half-year ranking, The Vegetarian comes in last. But if your bookshelf doesn’t have much Asian fiction yet and you want to dive into the world of Korean life, I’d still recommend giving it a read. Prepare to be disturbed—heh.