The Vegetarian: A Novel (Fiction in Translation) - Softcover

Han Kang

3.58

165,254 ratings by Goodreads

9781846275623: The Vegetarian: A Novel (Fiction in Translation)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1846275628 ISBN 13: 9781846275623

Publisher: Portobello Books Ltd, 2015

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Yeong-hye and her husband are ordinary people. He is an office worker with moderate ambitions and mild manners; she is an uninspired but dutiful wife. The acceptable flatline of their marriage is interrupted when Yeong-hye, seeking a more 'plant-like' existence, decides to become a vegetarian, prompted by grotesque recurring nightmares. In South Korea, where vegetarianism is almost unheard-of and societal mores are strictly obeyed, Yeong-hye's decision is a shocking act of subversion. Her passive rebellion manifests in ever more bizarre and frightening forms, leading her bland husband to self-justified acts of sexual sadism. His cruelties drive her towards attempted suicide and hospitalisation. She unknowingly captivates her sister's husband, a video artist. She becomes the focus of his increasingly erotic and unhinged artworks, while spiralling further and further into her fantasies of abandoning her fleshly prison and becoming - impossibly, ecstatically - a tree. Fraught, disturbing and beautiful, The Vegetarian is a novel about modern day South Korea, but also a novel about shame, desire and our faltering attempts to understand others, from one imprisoned body to another.

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Review:

'A startling new novel... The Vegetarian is a story about metamorphosis, rage and the desire for another sort of life. It is written in cool, still, poetic but matter-of-fact short sentences, translated luminously by Deborah Smith, who is obviously a genius' -- Deborah Levy, author of Swimming Home

'The Vegetarian is hypnotically strange, sad, beautiful and compelling. I liked it immensely' -- Nathan Filer, Costa Award winning author of The Shock of the Fall

'This short novel is one of the most startling I have read. Han Kang is well served by Deborah Smith's subtle translation in this disturbing book' -- Independent on Sunday

'Elegantly translated into bone-spare English by Deborah Smith, The Vegetarian is a book about the failures of language and the symmetries of the physical. Yet its message should not undermine Han's achievement as a writer. Like its anti-protagonist, The Vegetarian whispers so clearly, it can be heard across the room, insistently and with devastating, quiet violence' -- New Statesman

'Enthralling... It has a surreal and spellbinding quality, especially in its passage on nature and the physical landscape, so beautiful and so magnificently impervious to the human suffering around it' -- Independent

'Sensual, provocative and violent, ripe with potent images, startling colours and disturbing questions. Sentence by sentence, The Vegetarian is an extraordinary experience' --Guardian

'The Vegetarian is so strange and vivid it left me breathless upon finishing it. I don't think I've ever read a novel as mouth-wateringly poetic, or as drenched in hypnotic oddities, taboos and scandal. It seems to have been plucked out of the ether, ready-made to take us all by surprise' -- New Internationalist

'Unsettling... A strange and ethereal fable, rendered stranger still by the cool precision of the prose' -- Times Literary Supplement

'Mind-blowing... Han skilfully builds the story. The writing throughout is precise and spare. The Vegetarian quickly settles into a dark, menacing brilliance. Deborah Smith's quiet, underplayed translation is effective at evoking a mood of suppressed dread. For all the graphic, often choreographed description, Han Kang has mastered eloquent restraint in a work of savage beauty and unnerving physicality' --Irish Times

'Unsettling... A strange and ethereal fable, rendered stranger still by the cool precision of the prose'

'[The Vegetarian is] about a madness in which the mad woman is only the subject, never the speaker. It's a novel that illustrates the patriarchal nature of South Korea in subtle, provocative ways. And it's a beautiful book about a woman who, after having a disturbing dream, decides to become a vegetarian, and ends with her transforming into a tree.'Chad W Post, Frankfurt Show Daily --Times Literary Supplement

About the Author:

HAN KANG was born in Gwangju, South Korea, and moved to Seoul at the age of ten. She studied Korean literature at Yonsei University. Her writing has won the Yi Sang Literary Prize, the Today's Young Artist Award, and the Korean Literature Novel Award. She currently teaches creative writing at the Seoul Institute of the Arts. DEBORAH SMITH is working on a PhD in Korean literature at SOAS, University of London. She has translated The Essayist's Desk by Bae Suah, as well as short stories by Kim Kyung-uk and Kim Ae-ran.

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