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Review: The Vegetarian by Han Kang

Oct 24, 2024 05:58 PM IST

The best known novel by the winner of this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature looks at the high cost that women, particularly, have to pay if they attempt to escape the rigid structures of society

Somewhere around the first quarter of The Vegetarian by Han Kang, the protagonist Yeong-hye describes her breasts as harmless, unlike the “weaponized” parts of her body: her hands, her gaze, her tongue. “Can only trust my breasts now. I like my breasts, nothing can be killed by them. Hand, foot, tongue, gaze, all weapons from which nothing is safe. But not my breasts. With my round breasts, I’m okay.” The novel opens with her decision to renounce meat which quickly spirals into a rejection of her very corporeality. Han Kang doesn’t allow for even a single moment where Yeong-hye’s decision can be neatly explained, no clear motive or epiphany. The story forcefully pushes back against the reader’s nosiness to unravel its myriad layers. It forces us to confront the uncomfortable reality that autonomy, particularly for women in deeply patriarchal societies, might be unattainable, and the pursuit of it can lead to both personal and collective destruction.

A street in downtown Seoul. (Shutterstock)
A street in downtown Seoul. (Shutterstock)

v192pp, ₹499; Penguin
v192pp, ₹499; Penguin

Kang uses the breast as a site of subversion, and challenges the culturally idealized feminine form. The grotesque aesthetic here functions as a “creative psychic defence,” where Yeong-hye’s embodied rejection of violence evokes a deep ambivalence about societal norms of femininity. The duality then, becomes metaphor for the tension between self-assertion and objectification. Kang’s narrative critiques the patriarchal gaze by rendering the breast not as a spectacle, but as a radical assertion of autonomy. She then goes on to exploring the psychosocial tensions between embodied experience and cultural enculturation. Through Yeong-hye, life and death are made inseparable, and terrifyingly ambiguous.

The novel is told in three distinct parts, each with a different gaze on the increasingly unreachable protagonist, whose decision to stop eating meat triggers a series of events that leave her family spiraling in their attempts to understand her. Yeong-hye’s body becomes a battleground, first for her husband, then for her brother-in-law, and finally for the medical establishment. Each character in the novel, except for Yeong-hye herself, tries to impose their interpretation of normalcy on her, reducing her to an object of pity, obsession, or clinical interest.

The first and the most immediate gaze is that of her husband, whose narrative is striking in its shallowness. It reveals his own frustration and embarrassment at his wife’s decision, not out of concern for her well-being, but because of the inconvenience it causes him socially. His preoccupation with appearances, culminating in a brutal scene where she is force-fed meat reveals the everyday violence hidden in societal expectations. His voice is pragmatic, almost bored, which makes his growing anger and eventual violence all the more chilling. He is more a force of normalcy than a person. He had married a cow instead of a “woman who was pretty, intelligent, strikingly sensual, the daughters of rich families -- they would only have served to disrupt my carefully ordered existence.”

As the novel shifts into the brother-in-law’s gaze in the second section, the violence becomes more insidious. The brother-in-law, an aspiring video artist, becomes fixated on Yeong-hye’s body as a canvas for his art. This spirals into an exploitation that mirrors her husband’s earlier violations. Here, Yeong-hye is passive, her will dissolved, yet there’s an ambiguity about whether this passivity is a form of defiance or simply a further step into the abyss. The brother-in-law’s actions, like those of the husband, are framed by a selfishness disguised as a quest for meaning. He claims to see something transcendent in Yeong-hye, but in reality, he is projecting his own desires onto her, much like society does with its expectations.

His voyeurism and eventual sexual exploitation of her speak to a deeper violation: the objectification of a woman who has lost autonomy. Here, the novel draws on the concept of violence as more than physical harm, it encompasses emotional and psychological dominance, stripping the protagonist of her voice, her agency, and even her identity.

The third section, narrated by Yeong-hye’s sister, In-hye, is the emotional core of the novel. Yeong-hye, now in a mental hospital, believes herself to be a tree. She refuses to consume anything but water and sunlight, a physical manifestation of her rejection of violence. The image of her as a tree is striking, and Han Kang uses it to ask complex questions about survival, brutality, and the natural world. In-hye is the only character who truly attempts to understand Yeong-hye, though even she ultimately fails. What makes this section so affecting is not just the familial bond but In-hye’s own realization that, like her sister, she too has been living a life of quiet desperation, shaped by the same societal expectations that Yeong-hye has rejected. But where Yeong-hye’s response is to withdraw, In-hye’s is to continue enduring, which raises the question of what constitutes true madness: the desire to escape or the ability to keep living within constraints?

Consider these lines: “This pain and insomnia that, unbeknownst to others, now has In-hye in its grip — might Yeong-hye have passed through this same phase herself, a long time ago and more quickly than most people? Might Yeong-hye’s current condition be the natural progression from what her sister has recently been experiencing? Perhaps, at some point, Yeong-hye had simply let fall the slender thread that had kept her connected with everyday life. During the past insomniac months, In-hye had sometimes felt as though she were living in a state of total chaos. If it hadn’t been for Ji-woo — if it hadn’t been for the sense of responsibility she felt toward him — perhaps she too might have relinquished her grip on that thread.”

The novel does not answer the question of whether Yeong-hye’s transformation is a descent into madness or a transcendence of it. What it does make clear, however, is the high cost of attempting to escape the rigid structures of society, particularly for women. The Vegetarian is unsettling in the way it portrays the quiet, insidious ways people can hurt one another under the guise of care, love, or art. Han Kang creates a world where the act of refusing to eat meat is a radical and tragic gesture, a slow, painful retreat from a world that refuses to see women as anything more than their roles.

The book, most importantly, does not overwhelm with dramatic flourishes or intense emotional outbursts. Instead, it has an eerie calmness, where disturbing events creep in with a subtlety that leads to the protagonist’s psychological unraveling. The novel begins with an offhand observation: “Before my wife turned vegetarian, I had always thought of her as completely unremarkable in every way.” The decision to become vegetarian in South Korea, a society where meat-eating is culturally ingrained, shocks not just the protagonist’s husband, but everyone around her.

The novel’s visceral imagery — whether it’s Yeong-hye’s dreamlike vision of becoming a tree or the brutal force-feeding scenes in the hospital bring out the bodily consequences of rebellion. In rejecting societal norms, Yeong-hye also rejects her own body, attempting to transcend it in her pursuit of an elusive freedom. This physical transformation is horrifying, but also strangely poetic (and it is promptly weaponised by Yeong-hye’s brother-in-law).

Han Kang’s narrative style is marked by its bluntness. The violence is never sensationalized; it is described in a dry, matter-of-fact tone, which paradoxically amplifies its impact. This bluntness is mirrored in the translation by Deborah Smith, whose choices preserve the cultural nuances of the original Korean. Smith’s decision to maintain certain linguistic awkwardnesses, such as the use of “brother-in-law” and “sister-in-law” in direct conversation, keeps the reader aware that this is not a story set in the West. The language barriers act as a reminder of the novel’s cultural specificity, which many Western readers may overlook.

South Korean author Han Kang. (AFP)
South Korean author Han Kang. (AFP)

Critics often frame The Vegetarian as a commentary on Korean societal hierarchy, especially in its depiction of familial duty and patriarchal control. However, Han Kang herself has clarified that the novel is not intended as a direct critique of Korean culture. In interviews, she explains that the novel’s true focus is on violence — both its pervasiveness in human life and its necessity. In a world where survival often requires harm, whether through eating meat or maintaining social dominance, the protagonist’s radical rejection of violence becomes a kind of protest, albeit a self-destructive one.

What’s remarkable about The Vegetarian is how it avoids the tropes of moral clarity. Yeong-hye’s transformation is not framed as a heroic or redemptive rebellion. Instead, it is something more elusive: a retreat which becomes an erasure of self. The book’s treatment of vegetarianism is another aspect often misinterpreted. While it serves as a narrative device, Han Kang is not making a moral statement about dietary choices. Instead, vegetarianism is a vehicle to explore violence, particularly human brutality. As Yeong-hye’s choices become more extreme, her descent into madness presents the question of whether it is possible to live a life entirely free of violence — whether such an existence is sustainable, or even sane.

Pranavi Sharma writes on books and culture. She lives in New Delhi.

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