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Book Review: The Vegetarian by Han Kang
Jul. 14th, 2016 05:29 pmTitle: The Vegetarian
Author: Han Kang
Translator: Deborah Smith
Published: New York: Hogarth, 2016 (2007)
Rating: 3 of 5
Page Count: 190
Total Page Count: 196,715
Text Number: 581
Read Because: personal enjoyment, used ARC found in a local Little Free Library (book donated: Bedbugs by Ben H. Winters)
Review: After a series of gruesome dreams, Yeong-hye refuses to consume meat—a change which spirals her apparently-normal marriage and family towards chaos. This is similar to Margaret Atwood's The Edible Woman, female food consumption as metaphor for the ways in which women's bodies and behaviors are policed, but the two books are hardly redundant. The Vegetarian is a fevered dream, impulsive, obsessive, grim. Claustrophobic point of view narration is balanced by a distance from the protagonist, who is seen almost exclusively through other characters's eyes. But it's not entirely successful, due in part to the slow start (blame that on a culture gap: vegetarianism is treated as wildly irregular, which inflates the action), the themes are grow heavy-handed, and the distance from the protagonist deadens the tone. (I'm also not fond of one character'smental illness functioning as another character's growth.) There's some evocative and confrontational themes at work here, but I never quite fell in love.
(Putting a "not recommended" on this but, honestly, I'm ambivalent. Great themes! intriguing atmosphere! PoC author, work in translation, also won the Man Booker Prize! But it was a little too literary fiction-y for me, so I got hung up on its flaws.)
Author: Han Kang
Translator: Deborah Smith
Published: New York: Hogarth, 2016 (2007)
Rating: 3 of 5
Page Count: 190
Total Page Count: 196,715
Text Number: 581
Read Because: personal enjoyment, used ARC found in a local Little Free Library (book donated: Bedbugs by Ben H. Winters)
Review: After a series of gruesome dreams, Yeong-hye refuses to consume meat—a change which spirals her apparently-normal marriage and family towards chaos. This is similar to Margaret Atwood's The Edible Woman, female food consumption as metaphor for the ways in which women's bodies and behaviors are policed, but the two books are hardly redundant. The Vegetarian is a fevered dream, impulsive, obsessive, grim. Claustrophobic point of view narration is balanced by a distance from the protagonist, who is seen almost exclusively through other characters's eyes. But it's not entirely successful, due in part to the slow start (blame that on a culture gap: vegetarianism is treated as wildly irregular, which inflates the action), the themes are grow heavy-handed, and the distance from the protagonist deadens the tone. (I'm also not fond of one character's
(Putting a "not recommended" on this but, honestly, I'm ambivalent. Great themes! intriguing atmosphere! PoC author, work in translation, also won the Man Booker Prize! But it was a little too literary fiction-y for me, so I got hung up on its flaws.)
