Han Kang

A dazzling poetic miniature about a woman who has lost the power of speech after a personal crisis and a man, her teacher in an Ancient Greek course, who is losing his sight. Both try to hide their problem from the outside world, but eventually circumstances force them together and they have to engage in the struggle to communicate with each other.

Lots of complicated symbolism exploring loneliness and the difficulty of making real connections with other humans, and bringing in all kinds of show more stuff about migration, divorce, Plato, optics, linguistics, and much more. Many chapters start in nice concrete prose and then drift off into verse after a while. Beautiful and fascinating, certainly not a book you can reduce to a single idea. show less

Em primeiro lugar, não sabia que A Vegetariana era um livro de horror. Para além de convergir pontos factuais para os horrores que vivi no último ano, ele também abrange o horror de ser mulher metafóricamente, ou seja, eu o amaria da mesma forma mesmo que não tivesse tantos pontos em comum com a minha própria vida. Especialmente porque além da identificação há o que a Han Kang faz com a linguagem aqui, ao tripartir em três vozes narrativas tão díspares, ela não apenas exercita show more estilo, mas também exemplifica a falta de voz da protagonista.
Obra verdadeiramente extraordinária e entendo perfeitamente o porquê dos misóginos não terem gostado do Nobel da Han Kang. show less

I got this book from LibraryThing's Early Review program, in exchange for an honest opinion when I read it.

It tells the story of, I'm ashamed to admit, a recent chapter of Korean history that I knew nothing of. In 1980, in the city of Gwangju, there was a Democratic uprising that was crushed by a government sanctioned massacre. The death toll is still unclear and is argued to be anywhere between 150 and 2000 people. The story centers on Dong Ho, a young man working/volunteering to process show more the dead before the government troops overrun them and fully retaliate. Each chapter tells of the aftermath from a different point of view and further along in time from the original event.

Kang plays with tenses and styles to great effect. The first chapter is told in 2nd person, something I'm not used to reading. The 2nd chapter was my favorite, is an almost scifi telling what happens to the soul of one of the victims, from his death until his ultimate release. It is a brutal unforgiving story where in the final chapter titled "The Writer, 2013", Kang, who perhaps is writing as herself and was born in Gwuangju, finds closure and forgiveness. It is a powerful tale, worth your time.

8/10

S: 7/3/17 - 7/10/17 (8 Days) show less

If you’d asked me before I started this book how I felt about a book that aestheticizes the violent repression of an uprising and its aftermath, I would have been skeptical. But Han Kang describes the events of the 1980 Gwangju Uprising and its aftermath in a way that honors the victims and their humanity without flinching at all from the grisly reality of their torture and death. At least one section of the book is narrated by a corpse, in a reeking, rotting pile of them. So it’s a show more heavy read and a beautiful one, and it comes honestly by that beauty. 4.5 stars. show less