The Vegetarian

With The Vegetarian I have now read four of Han Kang's five novels that have been translated into English. I adore her prose and artistic storytelling. This is her most famous novel, a story of Yeong-hye, a woman who becomes vegetarian and then makes a series of choices that give her other forms of agency, as the people around her become more and more aghast at these simple acts of refusal. Pointedly, the protagonist never gets to tell her side of the story. Her actions are told through three observers: her pathetic, patriarchal husband, her sister's artist husband, and her caring and diligent sister. Each observes her changing over time.

The first story is very difficult – her husband is an atrocious, weak and pathetic character who only married so he could dominate another human, and he is revolted by her small acts of refusal. The second is more mystical, and opens up fascinating questions about consent – Yeong-hye, despite being perceived as mentally incapable, still displays agency at key moments. Her mental capacity is judged more by those around her than by her – she seems perfectly comfortable with her decisions and her body. The third story, from her sister's perspective, is the best of the book. Here these questions of consent come to a head, and they are dealt with in heartbreaking fluidity by a text that seems to slip forward and backward in time.

Wonderful writing, but a very hard story and compared to her other novels it is maybe a little less refined, if still very powerful.

Cuando todo es violencia y opresión, lo raro es mantenerse cuerdo, funcional, productivo. Yeonghye no está loca, quienes lo estamos somos las personas que pasamos por alto el sufrimiento brutal al que nos vemos sometidas cada día de nuestras vidas. Que le hacemos un lacito y nos lo tragamos, igual que los productos procedentes de una industria alimentaria que sabemos que maltrata a los animales de formas que somos incapaces de imaginar, que destruye el planeta a un ritmo endiablado y que forma parte fundamental de un sistema que contribuye a que seamos cada vez más pobres. Sin límite y hasta las últimas consecuencias.

La principal virtud de Han Kang en 'La vegetariana' es, precisamente, transmitir esa atmósfera de extrañeza que nos hace cuestionarnos nuestra respuesta a ciertas violencias. Que, por comparación, coloca a Yeonghye a nuestro lado, preguntándonos al oído ¿por qué soportas esto como si no pasara nada?

This was a difficult book to finish. I wanted to finish it, for about a week, but the last 50 or so pages are emotionally harrowing. Hard work.

Stylistically beautiful. Terse and without any extraneous detail, it reads a bit like a ascetic philosophical exploration of decisions in society.

A lot of other reviews (and the blurb above) focus on the book's setting in Korea -- traditionally meat-heavy diet, traditionally rigid patriachal family structure etc. I didn't find this -- apart from the names of people (which are few) and the descriptions of food, there is very little to locate this book in space or time beyond being somewhat modern.