The Vegetarian by Han Kang

 

As reasons for wanting to turn vegetarian go, wanting to — in effect — turn vegetation is probably an uncommon one.

The summary on The Complete Review of Han Kang’s novel is ‘Nicely done, with some exceptional moments’.

That is also pretty much how I ultimately felt about Nolan’s The Odyssey. In both cases I kind of knew in advance that I’d find the composition of the work enthralling enough to overcome any deeper reservations. And so The Vegetarian was the only book I took with me on this trip.

I’ve mentioned before that I warm to literature which presents as apparently un-filmable. I was going to note that Han’s book falls into this category for a slightly unusual reason in that it consists of a triptych of narratives — one told in the first person, two in the third — each of which would be difficult to render as a conventional drama in its own right and collectively even more so — but then I learned that film-makers have already attempted to get around these difficulties, with two of the sections adapted for the screen separately, most notably the first as Chaesikjuuija (2009), which duly notched up a not-very-impressive IMDB score of 5.7.

Han originally published the three parts as separate novellas and they all derive from an earlier short story entitled The Fruit of My Woman. This reminded me a little of the five parts of Bolaño’s 2666, which lack the explicit unification around a single titular character, yet somehow fit together just a little bit better as a whole novel than the three here. (Dramatised — five hours — if not yet filmed.)

Whilst there is patently a gender-based perspective underlying this story (or stories) there are wider lessons here for anyone pondering a belated assault on the inflexible structures of society, some of which may have previously seemed ‘natural’, or at least unthreateningly conventional, along with a sense of the implied costs involved in any human battle for self-ownership, not just in the context of the Korean social ambience, but elsewhere too, especially when the aforementioned structures have an ingrained tendency to respond with violence.

A fine iced coffee con crema de that.