Genres: Fiction
My Rating: 3/5
Winner of 2016’s Man Booker International Prize, Han Kang’s subtle written book, The Vegetarian is a surprise package. It’s a long form of a novella and divided into three parts, first published in 2007. However, the concept of this novel originated in 1997 when Kang wrote a short story titled, ‘The Fruit of My Woman’. Set in modern-day Seoul, it tells the story of Yeong-hye, a home-maker, whose decision to stop eating meat after having a nightmare.
This leads to consequences for her and people in her family as the try to force her to eat meat. Relationships starts falling apart around her and everyone comes to a conclusion of her reaching the peaks of insanity.
The story is explicitly told to us in three parts Yeong-hye’s husband, her brother-in-law, and her sister. This accumulates to generate a surreal sensation, a sense of feeling you might have felt in some of Haruki Murakami’s novels. However, like the other surreal narratives, the content or the timeline in this book is flat and doesn’t overlap. The events described in this book starts taking place when Yeong-hye decides to become a vegetarian.
The book starts at a very fast pace but soon becomes distracting as it demands an attention of the reader. In the end, it becomes full of details that are important understand the cause of Yeong-hye’s maybe mania. From a reader’s point of view, this might sound exciting but in practice (when comes to reading), this type of pace affects the reading flow.
If you are looking for some experimental reading, especially from narrative’s point of view, this book may turn out to be an excellent choice. I have to agree, this book is one of its kind.
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I could not complete the book as it got a bit too much for me towards the end. I want to give it a try sometime later. Han Kang’s next book Human Acts is also an excellent read!
Cheers,
Bookescapade
I will check out Human Acts. Her writing style motivated me to carry on. I think her flow of writing has potential yet to be explored
I just read Human Acts too and gave it 5 stars which I don’t hand out too often
Added to my TBR!!
This sounds like a unique illustration of how people can think people to be insane when they just deviate from what everybody else is doing. Thanks for this review.
Intriguing. I am reading through a long list of international recommendations from bloggers, but may get to this since I do have Korean readers.
I loved this so much and wrote a review for the book on my blog. I have Human Acts to read next.
Looking forward to your review for Human Acts.
Stunning review I have heard so many good things about it and your review just made me want to pick it up 😊 to finally have an opinion about it
I am glad my review could help you decide 🙂 Looking forward to your views on the same.
Last year, I read The Vegetarian. In my first attempt, I had a similar reaction to yours but then I started over and recognized the brilliance of the book. Kang takes you on a journey in her writing and you have to abandon everything else you know and believe to be normal to really appreciate it. Different culture, different beliefs will lead to seeing things in a diff perspective.
I read and reviewed Human Acts here https://runwright.net/2017/02/21/human-acts/ if you’d like to check it out
I understand that you got the message she wants to convey with her words, but I could not grasp this message which you have logically deciphered.
Thanks for sharing the link, I will definitely check it.