The Vegetarian by Han Kang

Book Review

Title: The Vegetarian by Han Kang

Genre: Thriller, Erotic

Rating: 3 Stars

I didn’t know anything about The Vegetarian before getting into but I have seen it around and the synopsis sounds really interesting and it is giving me the erotic body horror vibes typically seen in horror movies like Audition so I was eager to get into it. We are following Yeong-hye and her husband, living their normal lives and they seem to be an ordinary couple. They weren’t sweethearts and the husband whose perspective we seem to be following for the most part, wasn’t even attracted to Yeong-hye when he first meet her but their relationship has worked pretty well. That is until one night he wakes up to find Yeong-hye stood in front of the fridge mumbling about a dream she had. She goes to sleep on the sofa and he thinks nothing of it until the following morning she fails to wake him up for work which upsets him and he sees her throwing out all of the meat and animal products they have in their home. By the time he returns home all the meat is gone and his wife proclaims that she is now a vegetarian because of the dream she had. Her husband believes that they can just wait it out and everything will go back to normal but it doesn’t.

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Even after months Yeong-hye is sticking to her vegetarian diet but we watch as her husband watches her waste away and doesn’t know if there is anything he can do to help her especially when she refuses to perform the duties he thinks a wife should. Between the husband’s perspective we get to see portions of Yeong-hye’s dreams which are filled with blood, death and what I believe is cannibalism although it isn’t explicitly stated what Yeong-hye is eating in the dreams. After months of watching his wife become a skeleton, the husband ends up phoning his family and his wife’s family for help in getting her to eat something to get her back healthy again. However, during this time we witness the husband’s attraction to other women including his boss’ wife and his sister in law which ultimately leads him to rape his wife in order to satisfy these urges. By the time the family arrive to help Yeong-hye seems in a bad way but despite everything she refuses to eat meat. The family see they have no hope of talking sense into her which is when her father tries to force feed her and when she refuses he hits her repeatedly before she grabs a knife threatening them but injuries herself in the process and ends up in hospital. At the hospital Yeong-hye’s mother tries again this time by masking the smell and taste of meat with medicinal herbs and while Yeong-hye drinks some of it as soon as her mother leaves she throws it up again. At this point her husband feels hopeless and doesn’t know what to do especially when he finds she has disappeared the next morning. He finds her in the hospital gardens stripping off her clothes and while he talks to her he notices a dead bird clenched in her hand with what appear to be bite marks on its body.

For two years, Yeong-hye continues her strange behaviour leading her husband to file for divorce and even after returning from the hospital she seems to cope quite find on her own but she does retain the strange habit of not wearing clothes wherever she can. We then switch to Yeong-hye’s brother in law, the husband of her sister In-hye. He is an artist and is quite similar to Yeong-hye as he experiences strange vision which he creates into art after learning from his wife that Yeong-hye still has a Mongolian mark, a bruise coloured birthmark he becomes obsessed with the idea it is in the shape of a flower and this features heavily in his artwork. After a while this obsession becomes sexual and while he tries to use his wife to deal with these feelings nothing seems to be working.

Eventually he approaches Yeong-hye and asks if he can paint on her and record himself doing so and she agrees but they keep it a secret from his wife. This session is strangely sensual but nothing happens but Yeong-hye does remark that she wants to keep the flowers on her skin which makes In-hye’s husband quite bold. He asks her if they can have another session but this time with a man who he will also paint and she agrees again. His asks his colleague J to be the other model and he reluctantly agrees knowing how beautiful his art is. However, J becomes uncomfortable when he is asked to perform sexual acts with Yeong-hye even though she seems to be willing before eventually leaving. The footage he has managed to obtain is good but he knows it can be better so he goes round to Yeong-hye’s apartment and ends up sleeping with her which is evidently the best sex of his life as he feels an energy around Yeong-hye that resonates with his own. However, while they are sleeping In-hye arrives and catches them in bed and while he tries to explain, his wife is under the impression that both of them belong in a mental hospital.

Yeong-hye is confined to a mental hospital where she spends the next year but the husband and In-hye separate leaving behind his young son which I thought was horrible as when you take a step back and look at his action they are reasonably logical but there is something about Yeong-hye that he can’t explain. He often remarks that when she strips she looks like a plant trying to photosynthesise which was an interesting image. During her time at the hospital Yeong-hye does disappear once but she is quickly found and when In-hye visits her, she remarks that her sister seems happier here than she has in years and contemplates leaving her there for the rest of her life. For the final portion of the novel, we follow In-hye as she watches her sister waste away after she comes to believe that she doesn’t need to eat and that she only needs water and sunlight like a plant. This is heart-breaking as we watch doctors try desperately to save her life with little success. In the end In-hye is forced to take her sister to the general hospital where they might be able to save her but that isn’t a guarantee. During this final ride In-hye reflects on her own strange dreams and the ones her son is beginning to have and she wonders if this was always a part of their family and what is going to come for her and her son. While this novel is disturbing with its imagery in places I felt it would have had more of an impact if there was more body horror in there. As it stands it isn’t clear if Yeong-hye’s transformation is due to mental illness or something entirely and similarly with the case of In-hye’s husband we don’t know if they were just mentally ill or whether they were actually transforming. I believe that if Yeong-hye had shown physical signs of her becoming one with nature this not only would have made the book more unsettling with some slight body horror but it also would have made other characters like In-hye comes to turn with the inevitable transformation which would have been interesting to see but it is still worth the read.

Buy it here:

Paperback/Hardcover: amazon.co.uk amazon.com

Kindle Edition: amazon.co.uk amazon.com