Book Review
Literary Fiction | Feminist Literature | Surrealism
“I had a dream”
That one sentence says it all.
The Vegetarian follows a woman, Yeong-Hye, who makes one decision for herself and her life goes spiraling.
She has lived according to the expectations of others for so long that the moment she chooses differently, she becomes unacceptable.
She makes a simple choice, she decides to stop eating meat.
But that choice is not allowed.
By whom?
Her husband. Her sister. Her father. Her mother. The society itself.
“Before my wife turned vegetarian, I’d always thought of her as completely unremarkable in every way”.
Everyone believes they have a right to shape her life.
Which raises the question the novel quietly asks throughout:
Is Yeong-hye losing her mind, or are the people around her driving her toward madness? Or is she the only sane person in a world obsessed with conformity?
Society has these invisible standards of how a person should live, behave, and exist. The moment someone falls outside those boundaries, they are punished, emotionally, socially, even physically, until they either surrender or break.
She makes this choice for herself and does not force others to participate yet her life is dictated by others who “supposedly” think of her “well-being.”
Her decision is treated with disgust, ridicule, rejection, condemnation, and violence.
Her husband rejects her when she does not follow his way of life.
Her father force feeds her and slaps her when she refuses to obey.
Her mother ridicules her decision.
Her sister is convinced she is wrong and tries to change her mind. Tries to fix her.
Her brother-in-law sees this as an opportunity to exploit and violate her weakness.
The author Han Kang in her book explores what it means to be a woman whose choices are constantly negotiated by others, who is still not “allowed” the freedom to make decisions for her own life. The tragedy is that her rebellion begins with something as ordinary as choosing to become vegetarian. While it might sound ridiculous that it is so simple, yet small acts are never just small acts when they challenge systems of control.
Reading this book was difficult and unsettling, but perhaps that is the point. If it is so painful to read, one can only imagine how difficult it is to be constantly stretched, wringed, and shaped into what is supposedly “right”.
I don’t know why, but I keep imagining a pot, like a piece of pottery shaped by someone else’s hands. A potter molds clay to be a certain shape but what if the pot wishes to become something else? The maker will immediately destroy it because it did not appeal to the design standards, it failed to meet expectations.
And that is the novel’s most haunting question,
No matter how much freedom a woman is given, is she ever free to live entirely on her own terms?
Time was a wave, almost cruel in its relentlessness as it whisked her life downstream, a life she had to constantly strain to keep from breaking apart.
This book is poetic prose, a piece of art, it is like a painting, or like an onion, it has layers upon layers upon layers of delicate fragments that you can unravel as many times as you want depending on how you relate to the story.
I loved it, if you’re someone who does not mind engaging in a challenging read, then I highly recommend adding The Vegetarian to your list of books to read.
Nuraine Sadaf 