Winner of the Man Booker International Prize 2016. A beautiful, unsettling novel in three acts, about rebellion and taboo, violence and eroticism, and the twisting metamorphosis of a soul
Han Kang was born in Gwangju, South Korea, 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.
Deborah Smith is working on a PhD in Korean literature at SOAS,
University of London. She translated The Essayist's Desk by Bae
Suah, as well as short stories by Kim Kyung-uk and Kim Ae-ran.
Shocking... The writing throughout is precise and spare, with not a
word wasted. There are no tricks. Han holds the reader in a vice
grip... The Vegetarian quickly settles into a dark, menacing
brilliance that is similar to the work of the gifted Japanese
writer Yoko Ogawa in its devastating study of psychological pain...
[It] is more than a cautionary tale about the brutal treatment of
women: it is a meditation on suffering and grief. It is about
escape and how a dreamer takes flight. Most of all, it is about the
emptiness and rage of discovering there is nothing to be done when
all hope and comfort fails... A work of savage beauty and unnerving
physicality. Mind-blowing
*Irish Times*
It's a bracing, visceral, system-shocking addition to the
Anglophone reader's diet. It is sensual, provocative and violent,
ripe with potent images, startling colours and disturbing
questions. Sentence by sentence, The Vegetarian is an extraordinary
experience. [It] will be hard to beat
*Guardian*
A strange, painfully tender exploration of the brutality of desire
indulged and the fatality of desire ignored... Exquisite
*A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing*
Entrancing and tense... the writing is spare and haunting... its
crushing climax, a phantasmagoric yet emotionally true moment
that's surely one of the year's most powerful... [This is] an
ingenious, upsetting, and unforgettable novel
*Publishers Weekly (starred review)*
The Vegetarian is hypnotically strange, sad, beautiful and
compelling. I liked it immensely
*The Shock of the Fall*
A stunning and beautifully haunting novel. It seems in places as if
the very words on the page are photosynthesising. I loved this
graceful, vivid book
*Snake Ropes*
The Vegetarian is a story about metamorphosis, rage and the desire
for another sort of life. It is written in cool, still, poetic but
matter-of-fact short sentences, translated luminously by Deborah
Smith, who is obviously a genius
*Swimming Home*
Poetic and beguiling, and translated with tremendous elegance, The
Vegetarian exhilarates and disturbs
*The Book of Clouds*
[The Vegetarian] is understated even in its most fevered, violent
moments. It has a surreal and spellbinding quality. Enthralling
*Independent*
This short novel is one of the most startling I have read. Kang is
well served by Deborah Smith's subtle translation in this
disturbing book
*Independent*
Kang belongs to a generation of writers that aim to discover secret
drives, ambitions, and miseries behind one's personal destiny...
[The Vegetarian] deals with violence, sanity, cultural limits, and
the value of the human body as the last refuge and private
space
*Tiempo Argentino*
Disturbing and beautiful, The Vegetarian is translated by Deborah
Smith into poetic yet matter-of-fact prose
*Big Issue in the North*
A fine novel
*Shiny New Books*
This off-kilter novel from Korea is simultaneously beautiful and
sinister
*Absolutely Dulwich*
The Vegetarian is so strange and vivid it left me breathless upon
finishing it. I don't think I've ever read a novel as
mouth-wateringly poetic, or as drenched in hypnotic oddities,
taboos and scandal. It seems to have been plucked out of the ether,
ready-made to take us all by surprise. Exciting and compelling
*New Humanist*
Elegantly translated into bone-spare English by Deborah Smith...
The Vegetarian whispers so clearly, it can be heard across the
room, insistently and with devastating, quiet violence
*New Statesman*
Fascinating and powerful. A really engrossing read
*Guardian*
Unsettling... [a] strange and ethereal fable, rendered stranger
still by the cool precision of the prose
*TLS*
In The Vegetarian Han Kang ruthlessly targets South Korea's social
codes, using the story of a simple, personal rebellion to expose a
callous patriarchy. Sharply ironic
*Totally Dublin*
[A] heady, unsettling novel... Kang writes in a coolly
unsentimental style, and achieves a delicate balance of restraint
and passion in a story pulsing with desire, betrayal and
destruction. Haunting
*The Australian*
Visceral and terrifying, The Vegetarian is a startling reminder of
the utter unknowability of another's mind. Nonetheless, reading it,
you will feel it in your flesh: the desire for peace, a plea for
safety, for escape from your own inevitable mortality. It is
artfully plotted yet reads like a fever dream, sweeping and
surreal. It will leave you aching
*Binary Star*
Considering this book just as a story about a vegetarian is a
mistake. It is rather a meticulously constructed and haunting
novel. Right at the moment you turn the last page, you'll feel
grateful for your ordinary life
*Please Look After Mom*
Like a small seed, Han Kang's startling and unforgettable debut
goes to work quietly, but insistently. Her prose is so balanced, so
elegant and assured, you might overlook the depths of this novel's
darkness - do so at your own peril
*Haints Stay and Coyote*
Brutal and beautiful - the translation alone is a work of art -
this is a book for anyone who believes that the novel's job is to
turn its reader inside out
*Guardian*
Subtle, provocative... a beautiful book
*Frankfurt Show Daily*
Immediately absorbing...It's the kind of story where every word
matters
*Sunday Herald*
An irresistibly weird and sensuous story
*New Statesman*
Han Kang's vivid and at times violent storytelling will wake up
even the most jaded of literary palates
*Independent*
A transformative fable about desire, frustration and individual
will
*Guardian*
Paradoxically, both enlightening and incomprehensible. It is a
strange book, with overtones of Kafka, and a plot that has no
resolution. And yet it continues its reader, turning the seeming
banality of a woman's decision not to eat meat into a surreal
psychological odyssey
*Litro*
This compact, exquisite and disturbing book will linger long in the
minds, and maybe the dreams, of its readers.
*Boyd Tonkin, chair of judges for Man Booker International Prize
2016*
Split into three parts, Kang's narrative dances tantalisingly
around her central character, the too-often silent Yeong-hye... As
a character she appears the twisted product of the multitude of
watchful eyes, the switching preoccupations, and the opinions of
those around her. She herself remains mysteriously elusive, her own
thoughts only ever revealed in sparing flashes interspersed
throughout the narrative... Teetering between explanations both
'ordinary' and 'extra-ordinary', she leaves no room for certainty,
constantly teasing the reader, and the ambiguity that remains both
torments and delights. This masterpiece of Korean fiction is
finally made available to English readers in Deborah Smith's
achingly elegant prose, the first of Han Kang's novels to be
translated. Thankfully I am certain it will not be the last.
*London Magazine*
While the narrative exposes the plight of women in a male-dominated
Korean society, it also takes a broader, philosophical look at
suffering and grief, loneliness and the death of hope. It explores
the brutal power shifts in relationships. On all levels, artistic
and moral, it is a remarkable meditation with universal resonance.
At its heart is the individual trying, and failing, to live.
Deborah Smith's translation, magnificently alert to the sensitive,
sophisticated nuances and tonal variations, can only be described
as inspired.
*Irish Times*
A truly memorable novel [with] visceral and unfaltering writing
that is innately uneasy to read [...] Han Kang expertly structures
the novel around the three long chapters that explore the voices
around Yeong-Hye. Though the narrative is never hers, Yeong-Hye
remains the focus of the novel throughout. Each chapter features
dream sequences which blur the everyday and ethereal and provide
the reader with rich and dynamic prose. The fact that these
sequences work so well in The Vegetarian is a huge credit to the
work of Deborah Smith who achieves a translation that is
wonderfully readable in English whilst at the same time profoundly
different to English language novels.
*Words Shortlist*
One of the most erotic literary novels of the season... The
Vegetarian has been praised on both sides of the Atlantic as
strange visionary and transgressive.
*Economist*
A haunting, hypnotic read, Han Kang's novel is a bold example of
what world literature has to offer us here in Britain.
*Harper's Bazaar*
The winner of the 2016 Man International Booker Prize is an
unsettling, sensual and surreal novel about a dutiful wife who
rebels against her stultifying marriage.
*i*
No blurb that I have read for this book does it justice. That's
because the premise is peculiar; an unremarkable man meets an
unremarkable woman and they get married. Their lives are ordinary,
until one day she has a dream that compels her to become a
vegetarian. At which point the tale goes nuclear.
*The Times*
Intriguing
*Observer*
At once dreamy and nightmarish, a beautiful horror and easily one
of the best books I've read in years.
*Guardian*
[An] engrossing read which takes you deep into the fascinating and
complex world of another culture, South Korea. The harrowing but
beautifully told story of a woman who would not conform.
*Western Morning News*
Fraught, disturbing and beautiful, The Vegetarian is a novel about
shame, desire and our faltering attempts to understand others.
*Western Morning News*
Kang has crafted a wounding, unsettling book. The fantastical
imagery of plants, trees and flowers reinforce Yeong-hye's purity.
The book is a journey in trying to understand her and the reactions
she inspires in others... Han Kang's great achievement is crafting
a small tale from which great things grow
*Irish Examiner*
A violent, magical and surreal tale... Unforgettable
*The Times*
I loved this haunting [novel]
*Observer*
Visceral
*Financial Times*
This slim novel from South Korea is one of the most erotic literary
novels of the season
*Economist*
[An] unsettling novel... This spare and elegant translation renders
the original Korean in pointed and vivid English, preserving Han's
exploration of whether true innocence is possible in a vicious and
bloody world
*New York Times*
Scary and sad, but also deeply tender. It made me question my
autonomy, which is exactly what I look for in a book
*Stylist*
A disturbingly cerebral analysis of conformity, autonomy and
patriarchy
*Dumfries and Galloway Life*
[An] eerie modern classic
*Metro*
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