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A review by porgyreads
The Vegetarian by Han Kang
dark
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
5.0
“What is she harbouring inside her, beyond the reach of her sisters imagination? What terror, what anger, what agony, what hell?”
The vegetarian is a book through which violence is explored. Specifically violence against women, the way it accumulates and mounts. Charting the lives of two siblings (yeong-hye and in-hye) and the inner thoughts of their husbands. The events that unfold are a frenzy of stomach clenching absurdity and opposition to resistance. Yeong-hye and in-hye are foils of each other shown through the survival tactics they develop to approach the violence from their environment. Yeong-hye, in one day deciding that she can no longer stomach eating meat, exemplifies the ultimate resistance within the world of their families.
When yeong-hye’s resistance escalates and puts her health in danger. It is in-hye that steps in. Whose adaptive personality in her formative years has built a mighty endurance of that is a mountain to match her sisters resistance. She is dutiful, earnest, unflinching. So of course her sisters descent into so-called madness, her desire to return to the earth, to spread her fingers and return to earth drunk on its sun and moisture, disturbs her, knocking something out of place in her mind that allows her to draw similarity between them. To see what they share after her husband crosses the line and takes advantages of yeong-hye’s withdrawal from the present world.
At its core the vegetarian is a pendulum, flirting with the extreme prospects of the ideologies regarding choice that each sibling represents. Yeong-hye fights for her ability to choose how her body is managed and how it passes through the world. In-hye in turn does not, can not. Her will is this dancing whisper of a thing in every passage of Flaming Trees. At its end, you wonder if in-hye has the ability the fight against the swing of the pendulum, whilst also finding yourself urging her to take a leaf out her sisters book, even knowing what fate (the opposition her vegetarianism embodies) has dealt her. The novel is nauseating and heartfelt concoction of filial drama. Horrific and poetic it unfolds as a tornado of dreams and symbols bleeding into life and rendering it unrecognisable. I didn’t know it was possible to feel so corrupted and yet so purified by a piece of writing.
The vegetarian is a book through which violence is explored. Specifically violence against women, the way it accumulates and mounts. Charting the lives of two siblings (yeong-hye and in-hye) and the inner thoughts of their husbands. The events that unfold are a frenzy of stomach clenching absurdity and opposition to resistance. Yeong-hye and in-hye are foils of each other shown through the survival tactics they develop to approach the violence from their environment. Yeong-hye, in one day deciding that she can no longer stomach eating meat, exemplifies the ultimate resistance within the world of their families.
When yeong-hye’s resistance escalates and puts her health in danger. It is in-hye that steps in. Whose adaptive personality in her formative years has built a mighty endurance of that is a mountain to match her sisters resistance. She is dutiful, earnest, unflinching. So of course her sisters descent into so-called madness, her desire to return to the earth, to spread her fingers and return to earth drunk on its sun and moisture, disturbs her, knocking something out of place in her mind that allows her to draw similarity between them. To see what they share after her husband crosses the line and takes advantages of yeong-hye’s withdrawal from the present world.
At its core the vegetarian is a pendulum, flirting with the extreme prospects of the ideologies regarding choice that each sibling represents. Yeong-hye fights for her ability to choose how her body is managed and how it passes through the world. In-hye in turn does not, can not. Her will is this dancing whisper of a thing in every passage of Flaming Trees. At its end, you wonder if in-hye has the ability the fight against the swing of the pendulum, whilst also finding yourself urging her to take a leaf out her sisters book, even knowing what fate (the opposition her vegetarianism embodies) has dealt her. The novel is nauseating and heartfelt concoction of filial drama. Horrific and poetic it unfolds as a tornado of dreams and symbols bleeding into life and rendering it unrecognisable. I didn’t know it was possible to feel so corrupted and yet so purified by a piece of writing.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Rape, Violence, and Suicide attempt