Vejetaryen (The Vegetarian)

Careful: this gives away the plot and the ending of the book. It also contains scenes of sexual violence, self-harm and force-feeding.

Yeonghye has a dream one night. The next morning she throws all the meat in the refrigerator into the trash.

Her husband asks why. The answer is a single sentence: "I had a dream."

The book goes on to tell what happens after, and here is the real point: Yeonghye never speaks in her own voice again.

Three parts, three narrators

Part one: her husband.

He explains why he married her, and his explanation is one of the coldest pages of the book: because she was ordinary. She had nothing special, created no expectations, would leave his life as it was.

When his wife stops eating meat he gets angry. He is not curious about her reason, he is angry because he is ashamed: what will he say at the business dinner, what will her family think.

At a family dinner Yeonghye's father slaps her and forces meat into her mouth. Yeonghye cuts her wrist with a knife.

Part two: her brother-in-law.

A video artist. Since he heard about a birthmark on Yeonghye's body, he has been obsessed with her.

He paints flowers on her body and records it. Then he paints on his own body too and records them together.

He thinks he admires her. In fact he turns her into an image, and never asks what that is. He does not see that Yeonghye is ill at that moment, not in a state to defend herself.

His wife finds them.

Part three: her sister.

The only real closeness is here, and it comes too late.

Inhye has been compliant all her life. She never objected, ran her shop, held her family together, put up with her husband's oddities.

Now her sister is in a hospital, not eating, thinking she is a plant. Inhye visits her, and with each visit questions her own life a little more.

The most shattering sentence of the book is in her: she realizes that what her sister did is what she herself also wanted to do, but did not dare.

A silent center

This is the book's boldest decision, I think.

You write a novel about a woman and never give her the floor.

There are a few italic passages inserted in between, dream fragments, broken sentences. That is all there is that comes close to her voice, and even they do not build a full narrative.

Because the subject of the book is not what Yeonghye thinks. The subject is everyone thinking on her behalf.

Nobody asks her what happened. Everyone discusses what should be done. The father force-feeds her, the husband divorces her, doctors feed her, the brother-in-law uses her, her sister decides.

To be lost inside decisions made about yourself. That is the real subject of the book, and giving up meat is only the door.

Why it stayed with me so much

One person's "no" being treated as a problem that everyone has to solve.

Yeonghye uses no violence. She forces no one. She asks nothing of anyone.

She just stops doing something, and that alone is enough to set the whole family in motion.

I recognize this. The scale is entirely different but the mechanism is the same: when you set a boundary, the boundary itself becomes the subject of argument, and why you set it is never asked.

Becoming a tree

In the third part Yeonghye no longer eats. She says she is a plant, that she needs water and sun. She does handstands, because trees have their roots below.

It is possible to read this as a metaphor: withdrawal from humanity, from violence, from the body.

It is also possible to read it as a picture of an illness, and the book chooses to stay between the two.

Han Kang does not decide here, and this uncertainty disturbed me. In a good way. If she had given an answer the book would have shrunk.

The South Korean context

The book has one more layer, and I realized afterward that I had missed it.

The hierarchy inside the family, the father's absolute authority, the expectation that women comply, the obligation to keep up the image of a "trouble-free family" toward the outside.

Yeonghye's refusal is not only of meat, but of this whole order.

An honest warning

This is not an easy book, and being short does not help.

Two hundred pages, but the scenes are heavy. Han Kang writes them in a cold language, and the coldness does not reduce the effect, it increases it.

It is not a book to read to feel good. But after you finish it leaves something, and that something does not come out easily.

It won the International Booker in 2016; Han Kang won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2024.