채식주의자

The Vegetarian—winner of the Booker Prize and written by the Nobel laureate Han Kang—is one of those novels that’s both brutally transparent and hard to pin down. What is it? A feminist text about radical refusal? A condemnation of South Korea’s mechanisms of control? A study of the lies people tell so they never have to confront the cruelty they inflict? Whatever it is, it’s not about vegetarianism. What’s astonishing is how upsetting this book is while remaining almost entirely calm. There’s a quiet sense of inevitability running underneath: you never doubt that Yeong-hye will endure. Her refusal—simple, unwavering—has a force no one around her can neutralize. Confronted with an unexpected and unacceptable boundary, the violence escalates in a bid to restore the comfort they once had, that’s now denied them. The men empathize with one another, father apologizing to the husband. How shameful. People keep asking, “When did this start?” and answering, “When she stopped eating meat.” But that’s not true, is it? It started years ago. It started with the father—violent, drunk, traumatized by the war—and it never really stopped. It was always violent; she just let them pretend otherwise. When did it start? Who knows. Thousands of years ago? People call it Kafkaesque; I don’t see it. Kafka is jittery, sharp, somehow bringing to mind the click-clack of industrial machinery. Kang’s approach is different: cooler, steadier, more radical. In this book, she goes further. She allows a refusal that extends beyond gender norms, culture, the social contract. Go as far as you need to, reject your species, your genus, your kingdom. Climb as far back up the taxonomy tree as you need to, to escape the violence. It’s a lot for such a quiet novel. But that’s probably the point.