Vegetarian

Author: Han Kang Publication date: 2018 Book genre: Short story and novel Publisher: Dar Al Tanweer Number of pages: 223 Format: Paperback About the novel: The novel "The Vegetarian" takes us into worlds overflowing with humanity and wild emotions to the point of rejection, amid conflicts of family dominance, societal monotony, and self-consumption in the grind of our daily lives, until the body awakens to its decisive uprising. Yeong-hye suddenly wakes from a dream, refusing to eat any kind of meat, and takes vegetarianism as a path for her nourishment. Gradually, it becomes clear that there is a philosophy behind her decision, which her older sister’s husband also falls into, engaging in an intimate relationship of merging between two bodies without uttering a word. They merge into a single physical scene for an epic painting that forms a large part of the novel’s fantasy, and they intertwine in a surreal scene drawn and documented by the sister’s husband, the painter, who suddenly appears as a central character in the novel after being marginal in its early chapters. The novel brutally questions the causes of life and the reasons for survival through the heroine’s rejection of any means of feeding her body, as if saying nothing worth staying for exists except a few roses and trees that could be born from our bodies if we cling to the earth to draw strength from it. A daring approach that leaves us facing the trivialization of death for the sake of an idea, and mocks us for continuing our lives with daily routines that seem monotonous when compared to the vegetarian’s uprising. Han Kang is a South Korean writer born in 1970, daughter of novelist Han Sung-won. Her novel "The Vegetarian" won the Man Booker International Prize in 2016, and her book "The White Book" made the short list for the same prize in 2018.