{"id":10800,"date":"2025-05-15T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2025-05-15T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/?p=10800"},"modified":"2025-05-14T16:54:18","modified_gmt":"2025-05-14T20:54:18","slug":"the-vegetarian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/2025\/05\/15\/the-vegetarian\/","title":{"rendered":"The Vegetarian."},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Han Kang won the first Booker International Prize given to a single work of fiction for her novel The Vegetarian<\/a><\/em>, and in 2024 she won the Nobel Prize in Literature for her entire body of work, much of which is still unavailable in English. The Vegetarian<\/em> is a shocking novel in many ways, not least of which is how the title character, who is assaulted in multiple ways for deciding on a simple act of bodily autonomy, never gets to tell us her perspective.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Vegetarian<\/em> has three parts, each of which is told from the perspective of someone close to Yeong-hye, a housewife in Seoul who has violent dreams about animals and decides to stop eating meat. Her husband, whose perspective we get in the first section, is bewildered and incensed; he found his wife to be boring and \u201ccompletely unremarkable in every way,\u201d and so this remarkable choice leads him to arrange an intervention that includes her sister, brother-in-law, and parents. The intervention ends in violence of one sort, leading into the second part, told from her brother-in-law\u2019s perspective, which ends in violence of a different sort, before we get the perspective of her sister, who is the only person in Yeong-hye\u2019s life who seems to care even one iota about whether she lives or dies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While there are multiple shocking scenes in The Vegetarian<\/em>, including sexual and physical assault and a suicide attempt, the manner in which Kang tells the story is so anodyne that these incidents appear to come out of nowhere. It is the ultimate \u201cthat escalated quickly\u201d novel, where an ordinary situation spirals out of control within a page, and the settings of these jarring events \u2013 on gray days, in industrial apartments \u2013 just make them seem that much more out of place.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Where I struggled with The Vegetarian<\/em> was less in its violence or shocking nature than in figuring out what the ultimate point was. Giving up meat is a common choice, for ethical, health, financial, or religious reasons; it is actually the most normal thing Yeong-hye does in the novel. What she does beyond that, including almost completely stopping speaking to anyone around her, is harder and harder to understand. She doesn\u2019t want to die, but she doesn\u2019t not<\/em> want to die, even asking \u201cwhy is it such a bad thing to die?\u201d \u2013 twice, in fact, although the way in which she asks it varies subtly in a way I won\u2019t spoil.<\/p>\n\n\n\n