Skip to main content

Review 42: The Vegetarian by Han Kang

The Vegetarian
It’s hard not to respect trees. I try my best, but they always get me in the end, the cunning green-and-brown scamps. They don’t do anyone any harm. They just stand there, absorbing nutrients from above and below, pumping out oxygen with the quiet confidence of a wizard puffing his pipe.

It would be wrong to call that the central premise of Han Kang’s The Vegetarian, because it’s not. But the idea of comparing human morality against the gentle harmlessness of vegetation rings through its core.

The central character, Yeong-hye, a housewife, decides to stop eating meat. While this seems like a fairly small choice and one hardly worth building a whole novel around, the novel explores the reactions of her family and her own gradual slip into extremism in a slow-but-steady deterioration.

The most intriguing, and in many ways frustrating, aspect to the novel is the impenetrability of Yeong-hye herself. You’re never quite allowed inside her head, and so have to observe her change from the same confused perspective as the rest of her family. The reasons behind her choices you have to piece together from snippets of passive dialogue and the occasional dream sequence. While this can make the novel slow at times, it’s also had the effect of making it one I’ve genuinely thought about long after I finished it, trying to figure out what I think of its meaning and protagonist.

I can’t say this was a joy to read – it is dark, and explores human violence against passivity in uncomfortable ways. But the prose itself is beautifully composed, and a strand of surreality (which Word tells me isn’t a real word. How ironic) pulls you through the story. It’s curiously engaging and engagingly curious. Yes, I felt like a right jerkgammon writing that, but it’s still true.

This is the first time I’ve read Korean fiction, I think, but the style itself feels reminiscent of Korean films. Actually, the whole book is quite filmic, with vivid imagery and that distance from internal dialogue.

Kang’s work isn’t for people who want to pick up a casual holiday read, but it made me think a lot, and I’ll definitely invest in her other books.

--

This is my forty-second book review of 100 to raise money for Refuge, the domestic abuse charity. If you liked this review, or just want to help out, please donate on the link below!

JustGiving - Sponsor me now!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Review 43: The Lottery and Other Stories by Shirley Jackson

I didn’t quite know what to expect from Shirley Jackson. I feel like she’s often put into the thriller category, but if you encountered her alongside John Grishams and P.D. Jameses, I suspect you’d consider her misplaced. Mostly, though, I only knew it from a brief mention on The Simpsons, shortly before Homer throws the book into the fireplace. I know, I know. This is what you get from Broken Britain’s education system. Imagine my delight, then, to find that The Lottery and other stories is a collection of carefully-crafted short story gems. Turns out that people enter the literary canon for a reason. Who knew? Jackson’s stories have a clear theme running through them of propriety and conformity. She tackles these from lots of different angles – judgemental mothers, anxious homeowners, murderous communities. These are all brilliantly polished, mostly viewed from the perspective she knew best – city life in 40s and 50s America. There’s a clear focus on gender here too, w...
Post a Comment
Read more

Review 36: Vampires in the Lemon Grove by Karen Russell

Across the course of this challenge, I’ve tended to pick authors whom I know are well-respected, or books that have sat on my ‘to read’ list endlessly, gathering dust and weeping like abandoned children. So when I saw Karen Russell’s Vampires in the Lemon Grove winking at me, a book I’ve never heard of by an author I’ve never heard of, but with a frankly excellent title, I thought Are you Abba? Because I’m gonna take a chance on you. I’m delighted that I did. VITLG is a book of short stories, each of which follows a similar form: there’s a weird idea that forms the crux of the plot, and then Russell sets about making it feel fleshed out with believable characters. It would be wrong to call this surrealism, because there’s generally only a single oddity in each story. But it’s also not quite magic realism. It’s somewhere in-between. Or if it is magic realism, it’s 90% realism and 10% magic. It’s on the Murakami road. Let’s be exemplokleptomaniacs and take an example: in on...
Post a Comment
Read more