Books I've read: The Vegetarian

 

One of my colleagues gave me this to read, saying she thought it was interesting.  

I guess that's one word for it.

Books in translation are always interesting because you're not reading the book the way the author intended it to be read.  You're reading another writer's interpretation of that book.  And then you add in the specific cultural things that a native reader of that language would understand without any explanation and trying to put those things in context too.

This book is Korean and was the winner of the International Booker Prize about ten years ago.  So it's not new.  I tend to be slow to get to award winning books because when they're fresh off their award glory, they're in hot demand at the library so I tend to wait until things calm down.

It's a fairly slim book and I read the whole thing over the weekend.  It starts off being about a couple whose marriage has become stale.  They didn't have an enormous amount of passion for each other even at the start, but things have grown even more mundane now.  When a vivid dream terrifies wife Yeong-hye, she gives up eating meat.  A small act, you'd think, and a decision people make every day.  Yet here, this tiny act of rebellion against the staid life she's living, sets in motion a series of events that will end her marriage and tear the entire family apart.

Yeong-hye's sister is also in a fairly loveless marriage.  Her husband is an "artist" and spends long ours away from home, leaving her to care for their son and to support the family with her beauty-products store. When she catches her husband making "art" with her sister, the marriage collapses and Yeong-hye's mental state is deemed too fragile for anything other than a psychiatric hospital.

Yet even in the institution, Yeong-hye fights to keep this one, tiny piece of control over her own life and existence. 

Given the dramatic scenes and confrontations in this book, it was strangely emotionless.  I never felt I had any real handle on any of the characters except the artist husband.  And I think that was just because he was so single minded in his obsession with the "Mongolian mark" Yeong-hye had on her ass.  

Yeong-hye's motivations were far less transparent.  Clearly her refusal to eat meat anymore was a desperate act to try and gain control over her existence.  Korean society is clearly very regimented, and this was her way of breaking free in even a small way.  But the lengths she went to were so extreme, it seems possible that once she started controlling her world through food, she spiralled deep into anorexia nervosa.  The phrase was mentioned once or twice while in the institution, but it never seemed to be something the doctors take seriously.

I'm not sure I can say I enjoyed this book.  It was interesting, for sure, but I was never really invested enough in any of the characters to truly enjoy it.

But don't just listen to me.  Here's the blurb:

Before the nightmares began, Yeong-hye and her husband lived an ordinary, controlled life. But the dreams—invasive images of blood and brutality—torture her, driving Yeong-hye to purge her mind and renounce eating meat altogether. It’s a small act of independence, but it interrupts her marriage and sets into motion an increasingly grotesque chain of events at home. As her husband, her brother-in-law and sister each fight to reassert their control, Yeong-hye obsessively defends the choice that’s become sacred to her. Soon their attempts turn desperate, subjecting first her mind, and then her body, to ever more intrusive and perverse violations, sending Yeong-hye spiraling into a dangerous, bizarre estrangement, not only from those closest to her, but also from herself.

Celebrated by critics around the world, The Vegetarian is a darkly allegorical, Kafka-esque tale of power, obsession, and one woman’s struggle to break free from the violence both without and within her.