The Vegetarian

Kang Han

The Vegetarian (Korean: 채식주의자; RR: Chaesikjuuija) is a South Korean three-part novel written by Han Kang and first published in 2007. Based on Han's 1997 short story "The Fruit of My Woman", The Vegetarian is set in modern-day Seoul and tells the story of Yeong-hye, a part-time graphic artist and home-maker, whose decision to stop eating meat after a bloody, nightmarish dream about human cruelty leads to devastating consequences in her personal and familial life.Published on 30 October 2007 in South Korea by Changbi Publishers, The Vegetarian was received as "very extreme and bizarre" by the South Korean audience. "Mongolian Mark", the second and central part of the novel was awarded the prestigious Yi Sang Literary Prize. It has been translated into at least thirteen languages, including English, French, Spanish, and Chinese. The Vegetarian is Han's second book to be translated into English. The translation was conducted by the British translator Deborah Smith, and was published in January 2015 in the UK and February 2016 in the US, after which it received international critical acclaim, with critics praising Han's writing style and Smith's translation. In May 2016, it won the 2016 Man Booker International Prize. The Vegetarian thus became the first recipient of the award after its reconfiguration in 2015, prior to which it was awarded to an author's body of work rather than a single novel. It is considered as Korean translated literature's biggest win since Kyung-Sook Shin's Please Look After Mom won the closing Man Asian Literary Prize in 2012. Prior to it winning the prize, The Vegetarian had sold close to 20,000 copies in the nine years since its first publication. In June 2016, Time included the book in its list of best books of 2016.

16 Auflagen

188 Seiten

Sprache: English

Erschienen am 2. Februar 2016

ISBN:: 978-0-553-44818-4
ISBN kopiert!
Goodreads:: 25489025

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Fionnáin hat The Vegetarian von Kang Han besprochen

A tough novel about social norms

4 Sterne

With The Vegetarian I have now read four of Han Kang's five novels that have been translated into English. I adore her prose and artistic storytelling. This is her most famous novel, a story of Yeong-hye, a woman who becomes vegetarian and then makes a series of choices that give her other forms of agency, as the people around her become more and more aghast at these simple acts of refusal. Pointedly, the protagonist never gets to tell her side of the story. Her actions are told through three observers: her pathetic, patriarchal husband, her sister's artist husband, and her caring and diligent sister. Each observes her changing over time.

The first story is very difficult – her husband is an atrocious, weak and pathetic character who only married so he could dominate another human, and he is revolted by her small acts of refusal. The second is more mystical, and opens up fascinating questions about consent – Yeong-hye, despite being perceived as mentally incapable, still displays agency at key moments. Her mental capacity is judged more by those around her than by her – she seems perfectly comfortable with her decisions and her body. The third story, from her sister's perspective, is the best of the book. Here these questions of consent come to a head, and they are dealt with in heartbreaking fluidity by a text that seems to slip forward and backward in time.

Wonderful writing, but a very hard story and compared to her other novels it is maybe a little less refined, if still very powerful.

Hinobara hat La vegetariana von Han Kang besprochen

Extraño viaje

5 Sterne

Un libro que no parece ser lo que se presenta. Tiene tres elementos bastante delimitados con respecto al ser humanos: un elemento superficial, otro más carnal y el último, más mental. A Freud le hubiese gustado.

HugoHeagren@bookwyrm.social hat The Vegetarian von Kang Han besprochen

Culturally translatable ascetism

5 Sterne

This was a difficult book to finish. I wanted to finish it, for about a week, but the last 50 or so pages are emotionally harrowing. Hard work.

Stylistically beautiful. Terse and without any extraneous detail, it reads a bit like a ascetic philosophical exploration of decisions in society.

A lot of other reviews (and the blurb above) focus on the book's setting in Korea -- traditionally meat-heavy diet, traditionally rigid patriachal family structure etc. I didn't find this -- apart from the names of people (which are few) and the descriptions of food, there is very little to locate this book in space or time beyond being somewhat modern.

d10c4n3@bookwyrm.gatti.ninja

bewertet es mit

Juli 6