Click on a thumbnail to go to Google Books.
Loading... The Vegetarian: A Novel (original 2007; edition 2016)by Han Kang (Author)
Work InformationThe Vegetarian by Han Kang (2007)
Books Read in 2019 (70) » 26 more Diverse Horror (33) Female Author (562) Books Read in 2021 (1,864) Korean literature (11) Books Read in 2022 (2,766) Overdue Podcast (310) Asia (72) Female Protagonist (795) GeoCAT 2016 (13) Greatest Books (37) BookTok Adult (37) Loading...
Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book.
one of the most difficult things i've ever read. i had to continuously put it down and take breaks. ( ) Loveless but not Bloodless I’m cataloging this book for reference rather than reviewing it. After reading the 2020 International Booker winner The Discomfort of Evening I checked other winners and saw that At Night All Blood is Black and Time Shelter were past winners, and although I couldn’t handle At Night All Blood is Black, I recognized it was well-written. Seemed to me that the International Booker judges are into dark, and I like dark so I looked for more. I decided to give The Vegetarian a go. I had a feeling it’s be a dark read but as I’d been able to watch “Squid Game” I would be able to handle The Vegetarian. I suspect this book might be readable in print, but in audio it just seemed sick. Blood doesn’t turn me on. Neither does an anorexic vegetarian woman who runs around her kitchen chucking the contents of her freezer all over the floor. The book has chapters that alternate between the voices of husband and wife. The husband chose the wife because she was plain and he assumed he wouldn’t have to worry about her straying. I’m not sure why she chose him. I only know she had vivid dreams about blood. Nothing about the first three chapters grabbed me. Not the prose, not the characters, not the story if there was one. Life is short and is getting shorter. I gave up. I think it might be a story of a marriage, loveless but not bloodless. But thankfully I’ll never know. Favorite quotes: "Slowly she turned to face him, and he saw that her expression was as serene as that of a Buddhist monk. Such uncanny serenity actually frightened him, making him think that perhaps this was a surface impression left behind after any amount of unspeakable viciousness had been digested, or else settled down inside her as a kind of sediment." "It seemed enough for her to just deal with whatever it was that came her way, calmly and without fuss. Or perhaps it was simply that things were happening inside her, terrible things, which no one else could even guess at, at thus it was impossible for her to engage with everyday life at the same time. If so, she would naturally have no energy left, not just for curiosity or interest but indeed for any meaningful response to all the humdrum minutiae that went on on the surface." "There was nothing the matter. It was a fact. Everything would be fine as long as she just kept going, just carried on with her life as she had always done. In any case, there was no other way."
The strength of Kang's voice is in her refusal to smoothen the rough edges of her characters - they bare their scars and innermost vulnerabilities and yet don't appear drawing sympathy. What flows through "The Vegetarian" is an urgent need to detach oneself from the constraints of the human body, to transform and possibly transcend its limits completely. “The Vegetarian” is an existential nightmare, as evocative a portrayal of the irrational as I’ve come across in some time. But The Vegetarian isn’t an anti-meat manifesto or an uplifting story of emancipation. Instead, in dreamlike passages punctuated by bursts of startling physical and sexual violence, Kang viscerally explores the limits of what a human brain and body can endure, and the strange beauty that can be found in even the most extreme forms of renunciation. At first, you might eye the title and scan the first innocuous sentence — “Before my wife turned vegetarian, I thought of her as completely unremarkable in every way” — and think that the biggest risk here might be converting to vegetarianism. (I myself converted, again; we’ll see if it lasts.) But there is no end to the horrors that rattle in and out of this ferocious, magnificently death-affirming novel. AwardsDistinctionsNotable Lists
"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 her 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, 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." -- jacket. No library descriptions found.
|
LibraryThing Early Reviewers AlumHan Kang's book The Vegetarian was available from LibraryThing Early Reviewers. Current DiscussionsNonePopular covers
Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)895.73Literature Literature of other languages Asian (east and south east) languages Korean Korean fictionLC ClassificationRatingAverage:
Is this you?Become a LibraryThing Author. |