The Vegetarian is a story that sticks with you like a splinter: unpleasant, bothersome, embedded under the skin. Oh, what to do? Maybe just ignore it in hopes it will naturally work itself out. It doesn’t. Going about the daily rounds afterwards is fraught with challenges. There is the inevitable brush against small things that sends the inflicted area stinging with the sudden sharp reminder that an injury occurred. It can’t be ignored. Now what? Suffer through and let the body absorb this splinter on its own over time? Perform an operation on the now inflamed area to excise it, knowing full well that it’s going to hurt a lot worse to get it out?
That’s where I am with this book review. I am sitting here poking around a painful splinter trying to decide what to do with it. Some people find this sort of visceral reaction to a book the hallmark of good literature. I think those people are masochists. I certainly don’t want to be one of them, but sometimes I secretly wonder if I am. I have let thorns from the mean roses absorb into my being over the course of a season with a slow time-release pain, rather than taking the time to extract them and find relief, and I have read this book to its end.
My quickly jotted notes…
…did little to put it to rest, so now I dig in. Expect plot spoilers ahead, or just go read it for yourself and come back and help me out here. If you are sensitive and easily triggered reading about violence, then skip it.
I bought the book because the first line drew me in:
“Before my wife turned vegetarian, I’d always though of her as completely unremarkable in every way.”
What’s with this guy and his unremarkable wife? How did her converting to vegetarianism make her considerably more remarkable? I had to know.
Yeong-hye, the offending vegetarian, is all anyone in the book can talk about. In contrast, she does not get much air time in her own story because, judging by the profound lack of curiosity of those around her, no one cares at all about what she thinks. They are all too busy taking her personal decisions as affronts to their daily lives.
Her story is told from three perspectives in a chronological sequence. Part one is her husband’s narrative. Part two takes place after Yeong-hye’s husband divorces her, and her sister’s creepy husband picks up the narrative. When the brother-in-law gets arrested, Yeong-hye’s story continues from the perspective of her sister. Yeong-hye rarely gets a voice in her own story, other than to say she’s not eating meat and it’s because she had a dream.
Yeong-hye’s conversion to vegetariansm is incomprehensible, inconvenient, and unacceptable to her husband. It is unfair and he’s telling! He calls her parents and sister to lodge his complaints. They are equally offended by her decision. They all agree to deal with her nonsense and set her straight at the next family gathering. Before that fun family event takes place, Yeong-hye starts losing weight and she has stopped wearing a bra. Her husband cannot come to grips with the audacity of this wayward woman. He takes her to a work dinner with his colleagues that he’s trying to impress, but when she discretely tells the waiter she doesn’t eat meat, all conversation at the table halts for a beat. When it resumes, the merits of eating meat is all anyone can talk about.
“But surely it isn’t possible to live without eating meat?” the boss’s wife asks.
Shortly after the dinner, on one hot summer day Yeong-hye’s husband comes home from work to find her peeling potatoes in the nude. From the husband’s perspective, this woman has clearly lost her mind and cannot be trusted. Moreover her selfish behavior is ruining everyone’s lives, so his guy starts to enact violence against her.
The family gathering finally happens and this is the “big intervention” they’ve all been waiting for. It’s weird and disturbing. There’s a scene where they gang up on Yeong-hye and attempt to force-feed her meat. Events rapidly spiral downhill from there. Yeong-hye winds up hospitalized.
So, once Yeong-hye is released from the psych ward and her husband has divorced her and she’s doing her best to rebuild her shattered life, her sister’s husband picks up the narrative. He’s utterly obsessed with her and he starts using her for his…um…”art project,” which involves more nudity and other things and it’s way more than I feel comfortable about trying to explain here. Anyway, that is all put to an end when his wife finds out what he’s been up to. He’s arrested and Yeong-hye is taken back to the mental hospital.
Similar to Humbert in Nabokov’s Lolita, both male narrators gave off stinky airs of ,”I’m the victim here” in their accounts of what was going on with Yeong-hye (though with far less charm and humor). These guys and their “she was asking for it” vibes are gross.
By the time her sister, In-hye, picks up the narration, Yeong-hye is a permanent resident at the mental hospital. Yeong-hye from all observations has had it with humanity and is done eating for good and seems to be putting all her energy into becoming a tree. I don’t blame her. There’s another really fun (not at all) scene of an attempted medical force-feeding. Then there’s a long ambulance ride to a real hospital after the mental hospital inflicted an injury on Yeong-hye while in their “care.” In-hye’s internal monologue happens along the way – stuff about dreams, and the almost abandonment of her son, and how we have to wake up from our dreams, then she sees some trees along the roadside, “blazing…and undulating like the rippling flanks of a massive animal, wild and savage” and she seems pissed off at the trees and is staring at them like they are somehow to blame. Then the whole things ends with, “The look in [In-hye’s] eyes is dark and insistent.”
I don’t know what to make of that ending. As a whole, the story seems to portray how easy it is for people to justify violence. All the characters were stuck in their own heads and there was little in the way of curiosity, listening, or effective communication happening between any of them other than when it came to ganging up on someone who goes against the grain with self-determinism rather than following the established way. It’s about what we choose to do with our own bodies and to the bodies of others. It’s about the violence of being force fed. I feel like there’s also something here about our most basic connection to the natural world (flowers, trees, plants) which can be sacred or profane.
It is not the feel good book of the year, but it is one that makes you think and one that stays with you. I am already pained by too much violence in the world, so I prefer my fiction to be kinder and gentler. I might have preferred this story to unfold from Yeong-hye’s perspective. There. I think I worked my splinter out.
If you read the book, please share your take.
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