don’t you agree?” But soon her physical form creates the very negative space those close to her fear: weight loss, insomnia, diminished libido and the eventual abandonment of everyday “civilized” life.Īn ascetic tome this is not: The novel is full of sex of dubious consent, all sorts of force-feeding and purging - essentially sexual assault and eating disorders, but never by name in Han’s universe. At first she is met with casual disdain by family and friends a dinner acquaintance passive-aggressively declares, “I’d hate to share a meal with someone who considers eating meat repulsive, just because that’s how they themselves personally feel. “I had a dream,” she says in one of her rare moments of direct dialogue, her only explanation of her newfound herbivorism.

These three characters are largely defined by what they do for a living, whereas Yeong-hye stops doing much of anything altogether. Han’s novella-in-three-parts zigzags between domestic thriller, transformation parable and arborphiliac meditation, told from the points of view of her lousy husband, who works at an office (Part I) her obsessive brother-in-law, who is an artist (Part II) and her overburdened older sister, who manages a cosmetics store (Part III). And that’s where the misleadingly simple echoes of a certain classic premise end. When Yeong-hye awoke one morning from troubled dreams, she found herself changed into a monstrous. (I myself converted, again we’ll see if it lasts.) But there is no end to the horrors that rattle in and out of this ferocious, magnificently death-affirming novel. At first, you might eye the title and scan the first innocuous sentence - “Before my wife turned vegetarian, I thought of her as completely unremarkable in every way” - and think that the biggest risk here might be converting to vegetarianism. I finally had my answer after reading Han Kang’s novel “The Vegetarian”: What if “the despised” can stand up on their own?Īll the trigger warnings on earth cannot prepare a reader for the traumas of this Korean author’s translated debut in the Anglophone world. “I think we have to be willing to stand up for the despised.” I, a fan of transgressive literature, could not pinpoint why I found her post to be so much more vexing than the usual battle cries of P.C.-paranoiacs. Last August, Anne Rice posted a call to arms - on Facebook, of course - warning that political correctness was going to bring on literary end times: banned books, destroyed authors, “a new era of censorship.” “We must stand up for fiction as a place where transgressive behavior and ideas can be explored,” she proclaimed.

The vegetarian korean book