- Published: 05/11/2015
- ISBN: 9781846276033
- 129x20mm
- 192 pages
The Vegetarian
Han Kang
Translated by Deborah Smith
Yeong-hye and her husband are ordinary people. He is an office worker with moderate ambitions and mild manners; she is an uninspired but dutiful wife. The acceptable flatline of their marriage is interrupted when Yeong-hye, seeking a more ‘plant-like’ existence, decides to become a vegetarian, prompted by grotesque recurring nightmares. In South Korea, where vegetarianism is almost unheard-of and societal mores are strictly obeyed, Yeong-hye’s decision is a shocking act of subversion. Her passive rebellion manifests in ever more bizarre and frightening forms, leading her bland husband to self-justified acts of sexual sadism. His cruelties drive her towards attempted suicide and hospitalisation. She unknowingly captivates her sister’s husband, a video artist. She becomes the focus of his increasingly erotic and unhinged artworks, while spiralling further and further into her fantasies of abandoning her fleshly prison and becoming – impossibly, ecstatically – a tree.
Fraught, disturbing and beautiful, The Vegetarian is a novel about modern day South Korea, but also a novel about shame, desire and our faltering attempts to understand others, from one imprisoned body to another.
£8.99
Shocking... The writing throughout is precise and spare, with not a word wasted. There are no tricks. Han holds the reader in a vice grip... The Vegetarian quickly settles into a dark, menacing brilliance that is similar to the work of the gifted Japanese writer Yoko Ogawa in its devastating study of psychological pain... [It] is more than a cautionary tale about the brutal treatment of women: it is a meditation on suffering and grief. It is about escape and how a dreamer takes flight. Most of all, it is about the emptiness and rage of discovering there is nothing to be done when all hope and comfort fails... A work of savage beauty and unnerving physicality. Mind-blowing
Eileen Battersby, Irish Times
It's a bracing, visceral, system-shocking addition to the Anglophone reader's diet. It is sensual, provocative and violent, ripe with potent images, startling colours and disturbing questions. Sentence by sentence, The Vegetarian is an extraordinary experience. [It] will be hard to beat
Daniel Hahn, Guardian
A strange, painfully tender exploration of the brutality of desire indulged and the fatality of desire ignored... Exquisite
Eimear McBride, Baileys Women's Prize-winning author, A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing
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