Han Kang's The Vegetarian.
My wrist is okay. It doesn’t bother me. The thing that hurts is my chest. Something is stuck in my solar plexus. I don’t know what it might be. It’s lodged there permanently these days. Even though I’ve stopped wearing a bra, I can feel this lump all the time. No matter how deeply I inhale, it doesn’t go away….Nobody can help me.Nobody can save me. Nobody can make me breathe.”
The Vegetarian is a murky, searing tale of a hyper-sensitive young woman Yeong-hye in three parts, each, narrated by three different people. Part one of the novel The Vegetarian is narrated by Yeong-hye’s husband. Part two, Mongolian Mark, is life seen through the eyes of the protagonist’s brother-in-law, an artist who is `worn out because life revolts him,' and the third and final part, Flaming Trees by Yeong-hye’s sister, In-hye.
“Before my wife turned vegetarian, I’d always thought of her as completely unremarkable in every way…” the novel takes off from that frank admission from the protagonist’s husband. This nature of his wife (whose only hobby is reading) in a way, suits the man with a paunch, skinny legs and forearms, and above all with the inferiority complex about the size of his penis, until one day the otherwise run-of-the-mill woman baffles everybody by turning a vegetarian, following a dream, which is coming off a mask of a long intolerable loathing. (“Dreams overlaid with dreams, a palimpsest of horror. Violent acts perpetrated by might..”)
The only respect in which, the husband thinks, his wife was at all unusual was that she didn’t like wearing a bra (fortunately for her there is no government diktats on bras) because of the way it squeezed her breasts, because of a lump, constriction on her chest (a tormenting past! Sign of things to follow!)
Then the dream and giving up meat. The family is appalled. Lives fall apart well after she chucks out all the meat from the fridge and stops eating meat, even eggs. Her husband was convinced that there was 'more going on than a simple case of vegetarianism.'
It was the dream, 'violent acts perpetrated by might', her father, a quick –tempered Vietnam- war veteran who used to whip her over the calves until she was eighteen years old.
In an attempt to make her eat meat the patriarch thrusts a pork at Yeong-hye’s face and tells: Eat it! Listen to what your father’s telling you and eat. Everything I say is for your good. So why act like this if it makes you ill?
Yeong –hye had been the only victim of their father’s beatings, her sister recalls.
Not she and their brother Yeong-ho. While Yeong-ho 'went around doling out his own rough justice to the village children. As the eldest daughter, In-hye had been the one who took over from their exhausted mother and made a broth for her father to wash the liquor down, and so he’d always taken a certain care in his dealings with her. Only Yeong-hye, docile and naïve, had been unable to deflect their father’s temper or put up any form of resistance. Instead, she had merely absorbed all her suffering inside her, deep into the marrow of her bones.'
In-hye watches the lives of all the people around her tumble down like a house of cards and wonders,"was there really nothing else she could have done?.
“Perhaps this is all a kind of dream…but surely the dream isn’t all there is? We have to wake up at some point, don’t we? Because..because then…”
There are several ways in which one responds to violence. One is self-abnegation. The tragedy however is there are no answers.
“It’s your body, you can treat it however you please. The only area where you’re free to do just as you like. And even that doesn’t turn out how you wanted.” This quote from the novel bring Irom Sharmila to one's mind. In this times marked by all round violence, man –made wars and disasters (when even what a woman should wear is decided by people in power) this novel reads like a revolt, helpless cry of distress... Read and despair ? or introspect?
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