Vegan - Han Kang

The novel "Vegetarianism" takes us to worlds overflowing with humanity and wild emotions to the point of disgust, amid conflicts of family dominance, societal routine, and self-consumption in our daily grind, until the body awakens to its decisive uprising. It is Young-hee who suddenly woke from a dream, refusing to eat any kind of meat, and took vegetarianism as a path to nourish herself. Gradually, it becomes clear to us that there is a philosophy behind the decision, which her older sister's husband also fell into, engaging in an intimate relationship of merging between two bodies without uttering a single word. They merge in 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 her sister's husband, the painter, who suddenly appeared as a central character in the novel after being marginal in its early chapters. A question about the causes of life and the justifications for survival is brutally posed by the novel through its heroine’s rejection of any means of feeding her body, as if to say nothing worth staying for except a few flowers and trees that could be born from our bodies if we stick to the earth to draw our strength from it. A boldness that leaves us facing the ease of death for the sake of an idea, mocking us because we continue our lives with daily routines that seem dull when measured against the uprising of the vegetarian. Han Kang, a South Korean writer born in 1970, is the daughter of novelist Han Seong-won. Her novel "Vegetarian" won the International Booker Prize in 2016, and her book "The White Book" reached the short list for the same prize in 2018. Vegetarian - Han Kang