The Vegetarian by Han Kang

 

This novel is composed of three interrelated novellas.  Yeong-hye and her husband are living a normal life.  Then Yeong-hye starts having violent nightmares, dreams of blood and brutality.  She is desperate to find a way to stop the nightmares as they start affecting her waking hours with lack of sleep and a racing mind.  She decides that she will give up eating meat.

It seems a small thing.  Her husband eats his breakfast and lunch elsewhere so it is no hardship to give up meat for one meal.  He often has business dinners as well so it is even less of a hardship.  But Yeong-hye's family is concerned as she loses weight.  Her mother and sister beg her to go back to the way she ate before.  Her father tries to use his paternal power and force her to eat.  All it does is drive a wedge between Yeong-hye and her family.

When her husband decides to work on his art, he has a vision of what he wants to paint.  He asks Yeong-hye's sister to be his model and eventually a friend of his.  He has a vision of flowers occupying the world and paints them on his models and on himself.  This obsession leads to a further tearing apart of his marriage.  In the final novella, time has moved on.  Yeong-hye has been hospitalized in a mental hospital from which it is unlikely that she will ever leave.  Her marriage is gone, her family relations left far behind.

Han Kang is a South Korean author.  This novel won the International Booker Prize in 2016 and the Novel Prize For Literature in 2024.  It is an examination of how violence pervades society, even in the food we eat.  When one chooses a different way, it challenges society and there are consequences.  The novel also examines mental health and how it is treated.  It portrays a patriarchal society where women are subservient to men, both in family life and in the outside world.  This book is recommended for literary fiction readers.