“Why, is it such a bad thing to die?” #TheVegetarian #HanKang

 

Nobel winning South Korean writer Han Kang’s The Vegetarian (International Booker prize, 2016) rationalizes the inscrutable nature of the black hole kind of thing in every individual, iterating the idea that each one has their own bag of shit to deal with.

The book addresses the question of ‘what it takes to be a human?’  and the fragility of the components with which humans are made of.  A woman wants to become a plant, shedding all the human attributes that surround her. Developing from the 1997 short story, ‘The Fruit of My Woman’ this novel is written in three parts narrated by her husband, sister and brother-in-law whose lives are irrevocably altered since the protagonist’ decision to relinquish meat.

In the first part of the book, Yeong-hye appears as a normal, insignificant woman marrying a cold and indifferent person; everything about their life follows a monotonous rhythm until she being disturbed by a series of dreams that propel her to become a vegetarian. Losing sleep and speech, she aspires to become a tree. Her husband with no level of consideration abandons her. The family tries to force feed her meat but in vain as she harms herself.

The second part concerning her brother-in-law, an artist takes an obsessive lustful liking towards her for her curtness and the Mongolian Mark. He persuades her into an erotic art project, with flower paintings on her naked body leading to a sexual encounter, which is witnessed by her sister herself. Later, both of them are hospitalized for their mental illness.

 The third part narrated by her elder sister who is responsible and caring sees through her sufferings and tries all her best means to bring her back to normalcy, but strangely yielding to the sister’s patterns as well.

The darkness and horror of each of the character is surprisingly very relatable. Though we hear less from Yeong-hye, her transition is convincing, given the context of her childhood, abused by the strict father and the trauma she carried in herself.

The rejection of human violence and the quest for pure existence in establishing the bodily autonomy and control blurs the line between madness and sanity. The open ending kind of suggests that even her elder sister might take a similar path to escape human confinements.

I personally enjoyed the process of reading for it reminded me of the sadness that Murakami’s Norwegian Wood contained.  I did not feel Yeong-hye as the victim but someone who has liberated and found the means to do what she has to.  I found the images and obsession provocative as well. It reminded me of the pain, trauma, pressure that bogs each individual down. The overlapping depression and helplessness driven by uncertainty fuels the life we live. With a poetic, dream like narration the book is one of the memorable read.  The surreal and Kafkaesque images linger in the mind.

The book demands your full attention, confronting you with difficult questions about an individual’s existence in the patriarchal world. The following are my favorite lines from the texts.

“Life is such a strange thing, she thinks, once she has stopped laughing. Even after certain things have happened to them, no matter how awful the experience, people still go on eating and drinking, going to the toilet and washing themselves - living, in other words. And sometimes they even laugh out loud. And they probably have these same thoughts, too, and when they do it must make them cheerlessly recall all the sadness they'd briefly managed to forget.”