Lusting after your wife’s sister and other manly issues - The Vegetarian by Han Kang (Review)

 A/N: This review contains mild spoilers for The Vegetarian by Han Kang. This is your spoiler warning. 

I don’t know if it was the algorithm or destiny -the Booker Prize website had a quiz and guess which book I got matched with? The Vegetarian has been on every literary horror and “unhinged women” book list I’ve come across this year and it was now or never. We were fated to find each other and this book had me grumbling from the very beginning to end. 

The Vegetarian tells the story of Yeong-hye, a ‘run-of-the-mill’, simple Korean housewife (that’s how her husband describes her) who ends up giving up on eating meat after having a weird nightmare. And I was deeply invested from the start. The book is divided into three parts which seem rather disconnected from each other as each part is told in a different voice from different perspectives.

The first part is narrated by Mr. Cheong- red flag incarnate, fragile masculinity enthusiast and the husband of Yeong-hye. He goes on and on about how basic and uninteresting his wife is as a person. How he didn’t even feel the need to impress her because it was just not worth it? He’s also creeped out by her not wanting to wear bras. And after the triggering incident, i.e., the nightmare, Mr. Cheong is completely insufferable. He moans and groans about it being an inconvenience to him. He whines like a child about his needs and his wants and does not even once ask his wife if she’s doing okay as she slowly spirals into insanity. 

We get excerpts of what Yeong-hye’s nightmares are like interspersed with her husband’s whining, and they sound unhinged. Mr. Cheong decides it’s the final straw when he can no longer digest the idea of forcing himself on his wife and decides to complain to her parents instead. Her parents apologize to HIM and express how ashamed they are. The climax scene of this part of the book just made me lose my mind. For the amount of pages these characters are in, the amount of rage I felt almost feels unjustified.

The second part takes place two years after the climax of the first. It is told in second person but focuses on the perspective of Yeong-hye’s brother-in-law (her sister In-hye’s husband). If you thought it couldn’t get any creepier, well it does. The brother-in-law is a struggling artist who specializes in making performance art pieces addressing social issues in video format. Apparently the Mongolian spot on his sister-in-law’s butt is the only inspiration for his magnum opus. He believes that capturing the scene of him and his sister-in-law doing it is his life goal now. It’s apparently art because he’s gonna paint their bodies and do it on a canvas. Go figure. 

He says that he’s an artist who is ‘struggling to find inspiration’ but all he does is loiter around, spend his wife’s hard-earned money, be an irresponsible father and dream about choking his sister-in-law (in a kinky way). What really set me off was him complaining about how his wife’s goodness was ‘oppressive’ and her not complaining about his irresponsible ass is ‘suffocating’??? Like what do people want?

The third and final part continues in second person but focuses on Yeong-hye’s sister, In-hye. This part is something that I didn’t quite understand at times. It switches between In-hye reminiscing about their childhood, contemplating about the unavoidable effects of her divorce on her child and the slow-descent into depression she’s experiencing as a result of everything that happens in the previous parts. She’s a good sister and a good mother and I stand by it. She tries her best to keep shit together as her world unravels and the realization of how her behavior is conditioned by patriarchy slowly starts driving her crazy. Plus her sister thinks that she’s turning into a tree, so her sheer determination to be sane is commendable.

I couldn’t spoil the ending even if I wanted to because I did not understand it. For how short the book is, Han Kang does a great job at making you feel repulsed by humanity and mildly terrified of losing your sanity. The discourse about shame being associated with the female body and of a woman not aligning with societal expectations being seen as attention-seeking or perverse undercurrents the book throughout. 

Here are some quotes from the books that really represent the story better than my rant:

Before my wife turned vegetarian, I’d always thought of her as completely unremarkable in every way.

(Is this what men think about their wives?)

the inferiority complex I used to have about the size of my penis

(Well he admits it himself, so I didn’t have to say it.)

How on earth could she be so self-centered?

Who would have thought she could be so unreasonable?

As far as I was concerned, the only reasonable grounds for altering one’s eating habits were the desire to lose weight, an attempt to alleviate certain physical ailments, being possessed by an evil spirit, or having your sleep disturbed by indigestion.

But what troubled me more was that she now seemed to be actively avoiding sex. In the past, she’d generally been willing to comply with my physical demands, and there’d even been the occasional time when she’d been the one to make the first move.

(Mr. Cheong is an ungrateful prick who only thinks about himself.)

People who arbitrarily cut out this or that food, even though they’re not actually allergic to anything—that’s what I would call narrow-minded.

(It’s called a personal choice, Karen.)

Her voice as it sounded over the phone, always somehow more distinct than in person, never failed to send me into a state of sexual arousal.

(Did I forget to mention that being attracted to one’s wife’s sister is an overarching theme throughout?)

hear this patriarchal man apologize

Shame and empathy just didn’t suit him

(Right. His violence and brutality on the other hand is more suitable.)

I thought I could get by perfectly well just thinking of her as a stranger, or no, as a sister, or even a maid, someone who puts food on the table and keeps the house in good order.

(This enraged me. This is literally how Mr. Cheong describes his wife.)

Dreams of my hands around someone’s throat, throttling them, grabbing the swinging ends of their long hair and hacking it all off, sticking my finger into their slippery eyeball. 

(One of the rare descriptions of Yeong-hye’s nightmares. You and I both wish that the person who she’s throttling is her husband.)

She was even grateful that he let her take on so much responsibility, running a business as well as a household, without so much as a word of complaint.

(Oh right, I wonder why? It was totally NOT because he was an absent father and husband.)

She might well be called ugly in comparison with his wife, but to him she radiated energy, like a tree that grows in the wilderness, denuded and solitary.

(The grass is always greener on the other side.)

Such uncanny serenity actually frightened him, making him think that perhaps this was a surface impression left behind after any amount of unspeakable viciousness had been digested, or else settled down inside her as a kind of sediment.

(This describes trauma so well.)

What suggested to him that this might be the case was that, on occasion, her eyes would seem to reflect a kind of violence that could not simply be dismissed as passivity or idiocy or indifference, and which she would appear to be struggling to suppress.

(I liked how feral the main character is described to be.)

He held her at the waist and stroked the mark, wishing that he could share it with her, that it could be seared onto his skin like a brand. I want to swallow you, have you melt into me and flow through my veins.

(If this was in a booktok fantasy book, all the romance girlies would be swooning and I would support them. But guess who just cheated on his beautiful, hardworking wife?)

 As a daughter, as an older sister, as a wife and as a mother, as the owner of a shop, even as an underground passenger on the briefest of journeys, she had always done her best. Through the sheer inertia of a life lived in this way, she would have been able to conquer everything, even time. 

(In-hye. Makes. Me. Sad.)

She’d been unable to forgive her for soaring alone over a boundary she herself could never bring herself to cross, unable to forgive that magnificent irresponsibility that had enabled Yeong-hye to shuck off social constraints and leave her behind, still a prisoner.

(AAAAAAAAA)

Now, with the benefit of hindsight, In-hye could see that the role that she had adopted back then of the hard-working, self-sacrificing eldest daughter had been a sign not of maturity but of cowardice. It had been a survival tactic.

(It’s not your fault, your parents suck b@lls.)

A/N: The number of times I considered DNFing this book for the sheer rage I felt. But I’m glad I got through it and we could have this conversation. I’m aware that there are some discussions regarding how much the translations differ from the Korean text but the author seems to be satisfied with them so I’m gonna trust her because it’s her work. It’s really hard to recommend this one, but I’m sure all the intellectual, literary people have either already read it or have it on their TBRs. 

Thank you for reading the eighth installment in my ‘Women of Words’ series where I read feminist literature by a new feminist author each month. While this wasn’t the most ‘fun’ book to read, it's an interesting piece of literature and I hope you pick it up. If not to understand how crappy our society is, at least to get the full story since I cannot rant about the whole book without spoiling it.

To read the previous installment, here’s my take on The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi by Shannon Chakraborty.