The Vegetarian A Novel
FictionPsychologicalCultural Heritage

The Vegetarian A Novel

by Han Kang

Publisher
Random House Publishing Group
Pages
208
Language
English
Published
2015

Overview

Han Kang's The Vegetarian begins when Yeong-hye, after a series of violent dreams, refuses to eat meat. Her decision appears modest, but her husband and family treat it as a rejection of the order that has organized their lives. Told through the perspectives of people around her, the novel reveals how quickly concern becomes surveillance, coercion, desire, and punishment. Yeong-hye's own voice remains deliberately difficult to possess.

The book's three linked parts shift attention from her husband to her brother-in-law and then to her sister In-hye. Each narrator interprets Yeong-hye through private needs: respectability, artistic obsession, or exhausted care. Her wish to escape human violence through the image of plant life becomes more radical as others try to return her to a recognizable role. The structure makes the family's responses as important as the initial refusal.

The novel examines bodily autonomy without reducing Yeong-hye to a symbol with one stable meaning. Beauty and brutality repeatedly occupy the same image. Its unsettling force comes from the distance between a woman's attempt to withdraw from violence and the new forms of violence produced by those who insist on explaining, using, or saving her.

Posts about this book

1 posts from the Bookspace community

Audri@java· 1y🇵🇭

“The feeling that she had never really lived in this world caught her by surprise. It was a fact. She had never lived. Even as a child, as far back as she could remember, she had done nothing but endure. She had believed in her own inherent goodness, her humanity, and lived accordingly, never causing anyone harm. Her devotion to doing things the right way had been unflagging, all her successes had depended on it, and she would have gone on like that indefinitely. She didn't understand why, but faced with those decaying buildings and straggling grasses, she was nothing but a child who had never lived.” ― Han Kang, The Vegetarian

5

Ready to Meet Someone Who Reads Like You?

Read it in the app

Highlight, save quotes, share what you read

Get the app