Reading guide: The Vegetarian by Han Kang, translated by Deborah Smith

Fraught, disturbing, and beautiful, Han Kang’s novel is about shame, desire, and our faltering attempts to understand the lives of others.

Yeong-hye and her husband are ordinary people living in modern-day South Korea. He is an office worker with moderate ambitions and mild manners; she is an uninspired but dutiful wife. But then Yeong-hye, seeking a more ‘plant-like’ existence, commits a shocking act of subversion: overnight, she vows to give up eating meat. Despite her husband and family’s attempts to intervene and force her to come to her senses, her rebellion manifests in ever more bizarre and frightening forms. Gradually, Yeong-hye spirals further and further into her fantasies in the hope of abandoning her fleshly constraints altogether.

Han Kang

Han Kang is a South Korean writer. Born in Gwangju in 1970, she moved to Seoul at the age of ten, later studying Korean literature at Yonsei University. Her writing has won the Yi Sang Literary Prize, the Today’s Young Artist Award, and the Korean Literature Novel Award. She is also the author of Human Acts and The White Book. She is based in Seoul.

Written in Korean in 2007, The Vegetarian, Han’s first novel to be translated into English, won the 2016 Man Booker International Prize, the first time the prize had been awarded for a single work of fiction.

Deborah Smith

Deborah Smith FRSL, born in 1987, is a British translator of Korean fiction. After graduating from the University of Cambridge, Smith began learning Korean in 2009, after discovering that there were few translations into English of Korean literature. The Vegetarian was Smith’s first full-length published translation.

In 2015, she founded Tilted Axis Press, a non-profit publishing house devoted to books that ‘might not otherwise make it into English’. In June 2018 she was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Yeong-hye

Yeong-hye is the protagonist of The Vegetarian. She is a young woman who lives an unremarkable life in Seoul, Korea. She suffers from violent and disturbing dreams about the death of animals, which prompts her to stop eating meat - something that is almost unheard of in Korean culture. Yeong-hye’s act is seen as defiance and prompts those closest to her to intervene, which only exacerbates Yeong-hye’s withdrawal from the world around her. 

Mr Cheong

Mr Cheong is Yeong-hye’s husband and narrator of the first section of the book. He is a businessman with low ambitions and old-fashioned principles, who expects his wife to conform. When Yeong-hye rebels by refusing to eat meat, he begins to punish her – physically, mentally and sexually. Eventually, Mr Cheong divorces Yeong-hye.

Unnamed brother-in-law

Yeong-hye’s brother-in-law narrates the second section of the book, titled ‘Mongolian Mark’. A video artist with a peculiar obsession for bodies painted with flowers, he is married to Yeong-hye’s sister, In-hye. He develops a dangerous infatuation with Yeong-hye, concocting a plan to see her naked by asking her to model for him and a fellow artist. 

In-hye

In-hye is Yeong-hye’s older sister and narrator of the third section of the book. In-hye is more sympathetic than those around her to Yeong-hye’s situation and takes pity on her plight, as she experiences her own bouts of depression and mental health issues. She is the only one to intervene when her father tries to force-feed meat to Yeong-hye, and continues to visit her in hospital following a suicide attempt.

The Guardian:

‘This is Han Kang’s first novel to appear in English, and it’s a bracing, visceral, system-shocking addition to the Anglophone reader’s diet. It is sensual, provocative and violent, ripe with potent images, startling colours and disturbing questions. As Yeong-hye changes, the book’s language shifts, too, with Deborah Smith’s translation moving between the baffled irritation of Mr Cheong’s first-person narration in part one, the measured prose of In-hye’s world, the dense and bloody narrative of Yeong-hye’s dreams, and seductive descriptions of living bodies painted with flowers, in states of transformation or wasting away. Sentence by sentence, The Vegetarian is an extraordinary experience.’

Kirkus Reviews:

‘The book insists on a reader’s attention, with an almost hypnotically serene atmosphere interrupted by surreal images and frighteningly recognizable moments of ordinary despair. Han writes convincingly of the disruptive power of longing and the choice to either embrace or deny it, using details that are nearly fantastical in their strangeness to cut to the heart of the very human experience of discovering that one is no longer content with life as it is.

An unusual and mesmerizing novel, gracefully written and deeply disturbing.’

The Irish Times:

‘The Vegetarian is more than a cautionary tale about the brutal treatment of women: it is a meditation on suffering and grief. It is about escape and how a dreamer takes flight. Most of all, it is about the emptiness and rage of discovering there is nothing to be done when all hope and comfort fails.

For all the graphic, often choreographed description, Han Kang has mastered eloquent restraint in a work of savage beauty and unnerving physicality.’

New York Times:

‘All the trigger warnings on earth cannot prepare a reader for the traumas of this Korean author’s translated debut in the Anglophone world. At first, you might eye the title and scan the first innocuous sentence – “Before my wife turned vegetarian, I thought of her as completely unremarkable in every way” – and think that the biggest risk here might be converting to vegetarianism. (I myself converted, again; we’ll see if it lasts.) But there is no end to the horrors that rattle in and out of this ferocious, magnificently death-affirming novel.’

Slate:

‘Some reviews of The Vegetarian have insisted on viewing the novel as a piece of social protest, but this seems beside the point, unless the protest is against existence itself. Yeong-hye progresses through three stages of detachment, shedding herself first of the imperative to live up to empty convention, then of desire, and finally of the most primal attachments of blood and compassion. By the time her sister sits down in a hospital chair beside her haggard frame, and Yeong-hye triumphantly announces, “I’m not an animal anymore,” she has gone far past fretting about the pressures on women in Korean society, or any society for that matter. The Vegetarian has an eerie universality that gets under your skin and stays put irrespective of nation or gender. But exactly what its business is there, I would not presume to say.’

Han Kang:

‘I think this novel has some layers: questioning human violence and the (im)possibility of innocence; defining sanity and madness; the (im)possibility of understanding others; body as the last refuge or the last determination, and some more. It will be inevitable that different aspects are more focused on by different readers and cultural backgrounds. If I could say one thing, this novel isn’t a singular indictment of the Korean patriarchy. I wanted to deal with my long-lasting questions about the possibility/impossibility of innocence in this world, which is mingled with such violence and beauty. These were universal questions that occupied me as I wrote it.’

Read Han Kang’s full interview here with LitHub

Deborah Smith:

‘I think, as with any book, a lot of the pleasures and challenges were probably the same – The Vegetarian was initially published in Korea as three separate novellas, each told from the perspective of a different character, so finding the right voice and mood for each section, while still maintaining sufficient unity throughout the book as a whole, was a delicate balance. The second section proved particularly tricky, as it involves a number of sex scenes and we were all – Han Kang, the editor and I – concerned that it not come across as overly sensationalist, too much like ‘erotic fiction’ etc. Sex has a lot of different cultural and literary conventions surrounding it, and word choice in particular can make a huge difference to how it comes across. One aspect of the translation that was purely pleasurable, though, was the support I had from both the editor and Han Kang herself, who both made it clear from the start that they see translation as an art and believed that I needed to be allowed a certain amount of artistic license in order to produce an English text worthy of the original.’

Read Deborah Smith’s full interview with Korean Literature in Translation 

NPR: Don’t Be Fooled, ‘The Vegetarian’ Serves Up Appetites For Fright

Bookanista: Han Kang: To be human

The New Yorker: Han Kang and the Complexity of Translation  

LA Review of Books: What We Talk About When We Talk About Translation