The Vegetarian

Yeong-hye is an unremarkable Seoul homemaker who does part time graphic work, by her husband Mr Cheong's own flat, unsentimental account, until a series of violent dreams leads her to throw out every piece of meat in their kitchen and refuse to eat it ever again. Han Kang tells the novel in three parts, each with a different narrator and a widening distance from Yeong-hye herself. The first section, narrated by Mr Cheong, treats her refusal as an inconvenience and then a scandal, culminating in a family dinner where her own father, a Vietnam veteran, tries to force feed her pork by hand while other relatives hold her down. The second section shifts to her brother in law, a video artist obsessed with the Mongolian birthmark, shaped like a flower petal, that Yeong-hye still carries on her body, and follows his own escalating, transgressive fascination with her toward its consequences for his marriage to her sister. The third section belongs to that sister, In-hye, watching Yeong-hye's condition worsen inside a psychiatric hospital.

By the novel's end Yeong-hye has stopped eating almost entirely, convinced she is becoming a tree, standing on her head in an apparent effort to take root, and is found once, having wandered from the hospital, deep in a forest soaked with rain, as though she herself had become one of the glistening trees around her. In-hye, caring for her sister through this collapse, begins showing cracks of her own by the book's final pages, a mirroring Han leaves the reader to sit with rather than resolve.

Han writes bodily horror and family cruelty in prose that stays cool and exact even at its most extreme, refusing either lurid emphasis or squeamish softening, and reading it means watching a quiet act of refusal escalate into something the people around Yeong-hye cannot begin to accommodate. It suits a reader willing to sit with real disturbance and with a woman who, by design, speaks for herself almost never across the whole book.