Reading Han Kang's "The Vegetarian" was like reading a book of poems. While this book won the Man Booker in 2016, I picked it up quite recently after Kang became the first Asian woman to be awarded the Nobel prize.
It is very different from the general books I read so it was refreshing and exciting at the same time.
The novel is not a long read and divided into three distinct sections told from three different perspectives. The central protagonist is Yeong-hye. She is introduced to be the most ordinary of women, almost plain - a typical fly on the wall. The most remarkable or outrageous thing she had ever done was to turn vegetarian. Her transformation is not just a dietary one - it is something larger - akin to spiritual, something to be doing with pushing boundaries of expectation, conformity and gender roles. As the novel progresses, there is a sense of fading away - of health, sanity (?), perhaps even her sense of being a person.
The expectations from a woman and man are very different in this world. It is as if she has no agency over herself, her choices or even her body. There are several moments in the story that really stay with you and make you think, make you feel uneasy and unsettled. Even after I completed the book this feeling remained with me. A week after I completed reading it, suddenly something reminded me of a situation in the book and it made me stop. There is a definite lack of closure and it irked me. Perhaps it was intended by the author but it was truly unsettling.
There are recurring scenes and motifs of aggression, lack of consent and violence towards her - by her husband and brother-in-law, her brother and even her father. There is a particular scene where her father tries to force feed her some meat, in a bid to demonstrate his dominance over her. He is a soldier, a patriarch and most importantly her father - how dare she not listen to him, how dare she have a contrary point of view? Similarly, the husband, who never really tries to find out what happened to her. Or the brother-in-law, who obsesses over her birthmark and objectifies her shamelessly. It is only with her sister, that there is some semblance of personhood left. At a point in time, it seems like her sister is just an extension of herself.
Overall, this book left me feeling uneasy. The light prose, with the short sentences drawing attention to the starkness of the protagonist’s life and at times the longer ones bringing the reader into a trance like state in which we almost always find the protagonist. Is she happiest when she is among trees? What’s the point of life itself? If you want a whirlwind list of existential questions, pick up that book.
