WINNER of the Man Booker International Prize 2016, Han Kang’s novel The Vegetarian is truly exceptional in its blending of structure and texture. It is evocative, passionate, intelligent and deeply sensitive. In the carefully structured narrative subtle reversal of known responses disturb the reader and engage the attention till the last page. Also, a significant fact to notice is that the award money of this prestigious prize has been shared equally by the Korean writer Han Kang and the translator Deborah Smith. This unique feature of the Man Booker International Prize has been introduced from this year.

The very title of the slim novel The Vegetarian may seem to be irresistible to Asian cultures, where dietary preferences are often linked to religious beliefs, traditional customs, pride and prejudice, gender discrimination and violence. However, quite contrary to general expectations, the Korean writer Han Kang’s novel is not about the glamour or trials of being a vegetarian. The original written in Korean by Han Kang was published in 2007. In 2015, it was translated into English with outstanding felicity by Deborah Smith, who significantly learnt Korean just about three years ago.

The novel opens with a powerful one-liner: “Before my wife turned vegetarian, I’d always thought of her as completely unremarkable in every way.” The innocuous and yet provocative beginning of the novel leads the reader deeper and deeper into the core of the psychic terrain of each character, an invisible yet vibrant terrain, that has its own set of rules, regimentation, preferences and pleasures seemingly incomprehensible to the raucous world of public communication, inter-personal dialogue and vocal expression.

The silence of Kim Yeong-hye who speaks seldom, therefore exerts itself as the most potent, challenging and yet enigmatic medium of self-expression in the novel. Her condition is often diagnosed as depression and mental disorder. The novel is not a simple narrative about a young married woman’s dismissal of animal products as repulsive and as a result a triumph for animal activists, environmentalists, vegetarians and vegans. Undoubtedly it is about total rejection of flesh food but increasingly it becomes a narrative that expresses stolid rejection of all essential and desirable human food, both cooked and uncooked. And yet food is merely a metaphor in this journey for self-regeneration from the claustrophobia of urban life in an Asian society where the modern and the traditional are meshed in a viscous relationship of confusion and miscomprehension.

The novel is divided into three sections which could be read as three inter-linked novellas. The first part uses the first person narrative technique creating a sense of dramatic immediacy as the husband analyses his wife’s ordinary identity suddenly changing as she declares that she had a dream: “I had a dream”, Short italicised sections in this first part of the narrative reveals the troubled mind of Yeong-hye, as her mind plunges into the depths of being.

In the second part of the novel the struggling artist and videographer, the husband of Yeong-hye’s sister is the second male person who seems equally insensitive to Yeong-hye as a person. Unlike her callous husband who abandons her as she ceases to play the role of a wife as domestic worker, her brother- in-law begins to fantasise a passionate physical relationship with Yeong-hye. The third part is about the two sisters in the psychiatric ward, and the revelation that the sisters were traumatised in their several ways by the abuse and corporal punishment meted out by their persecuting, despotic and violent father. The father can be regarded as the first man who had scarred the normal development of his sensitive and intelligent daughter. Expectedly, both sisters seem to be almost sharing the same dream of liberation as the novel ends inconclusively.

Here lies the challenges and provocation for the perceptive reader as the volume of 183 pages, narrates the points of view of three young people trapped in familial, kinship and marital bonds with the central character. Yeong-hye uses her body as a weapon of protest, resistance and re-invigoration through a deep rooted desire to trace back to one’s very roots and re-align her selfhood through union and re-union with the silent, deep, systematic, uncomplaining natural environment and the primeval forests. This deep troubled call, an ardent desire to return to the lap of nature, to send one’s roots down into the earth and become a part of the vegetation, is also about vegetarianism, So Yeong-hye entrapped in the psychiatric ward refuses all food and medicine and merely craves for water.

Instead of human food as a source of life -sustenance and nutrition the preference for water and the desire to reverse oneself by returning to the vegetative world of course deconstructs the simpler notions of what most people understand as vegetarianism.

As mentioned earlier the fine and fluid readability of this thematically extraordinary Korean narrative translated into English is an example for translation studies workshops both in terms of text and context. In fact, reading Han Kang’s novel in English translation perhaps can even suggest to writers who do not write in English, the preferred subject matter that draws the attention of readers in Anglophone countries. There can be no scepticism about the fact that the award given to Han Kang’s The Vegetarian is well deserved as it successfully translates into English not just an aesthetically wrought Korean fictional narrative but the social and cultural parameters that define the unofficial social history and the politics of the domestic space of South Korea.

—The Statesman / India

Published in Dawn, July 20th, 2016