About the Book
Yeong-hye and her husband are ordinary people. He is an office worker
with moderate ambitions and mild manners; she is an uninspired but dutiful
wife. The acceptable flatline of their marriage is interrupted when Yeong-hye,
seeking a more 'plant-like' existence, decides to become a vegetarian, prompted
by grotesque recurring nightmares.
In South Korea, where vegetarianism is
almost unheard-of and societal mores are strictly obeyed, Yeong-hye's decision
is a shocking act of subversion. Her passive rebellion manifests in ever more
bizarre and frightening forms, leading her bland husband to self-justified acts
of sexual sadism. His cruelties drive her towards attempted suicide and
hospitalisation. She unknowingly captivates her sister's husband, a video
artist. She becomes the focus of his increasingly erotic and unhinged artworks,
while spiralling further and further into her fantasies of abandoning her
fleshly prison and becoming - impossibly, ecstatically - a tree.
Fraught, disturbing and beautiful, The Vegetarian is a novel about
modern day South Korea, but also a novel about shame, desire and our faltering
attempts to understand others, from one imprisoned body to another.
About the Author
Han Kang was born in Gwangju, and moved to Seoul at the age of ten. She studied Korean
literature at Yonsei University. Her writing has won the Yi Sang Literary
Prize, the Today's Young Artist Award, and the Korean Literature Novel Award.
She currently teaches creative writing at the Seoul Institute of the Arts.
About the Translator
Deborah Smith is working on a PhD
in Korean literature at the University of London. She has translated The Essayist's Desk by Bae Suah, as well
as short stories by Kim Kyung-uk and Kim Ae-ran.
Buying the Book
The Vegetarian is published by Portobello Books in paperback and
eBook. The paperback is priced in local currencies. To buy the eBook from the
Amazon US site, at USD 11.99, click here.
