Summer Lake Read Down

“The Vegetarian,” by Han Kang, 2007 / 2015 English Version

I’m mostly a vegetarian, so of course I was attracted to a book with this title, especially set in South Korea, a place famous for barbecue and obsessed with pork.  Meat, meat meat!  And there was nothing much else to read in the bookstore I got it from.  The book however is not a look at the narrow cultural norms of a certain authoritarian middle-class strata in South Korea.  No, the vegetarianism in the book is merely a prelude to the slow suicide by starvation of a quiet Korean woman, Yeong-hye.  This is a terrible book, and I don’t mean that in a good way.

Another name for starvation?

But the book garnered the Booker International Prize and kudos from the usual suspects - the New York Times (10 best books, 2016!), Entertainment Weekly, Oprah, the Minneapolis Star Tribune and many more. What more could you want?

I’ve been criticizing the Iowa Writers Workshop for turning out formulaic writers who mostly dwell on personal / family stories set in middle-class settings, full of psychology and pompous images, while paying a very high price for their tuition entry into the hallowed halls.  I’m not alone. I know this is heresy.  I’ve never read a book by one of these people and, to my surprise, after I finished this one, I read the internal blurb on the author and sure enough, she was 'educated' at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop.

I’ve been to the main bookstore in downtown Iowa City, Prairie Lights (the name stolen from you know what…), the same town where the Workshop is located.  The bookstore’s politics section is two small shelves hidden away in a sub-bookshelf.  I had to ask where it was.  This bookstore is the main commercial reference for the esteemed geniuses there.  You can only laugh.

Here is how vegetarianism works in this book.  Yeong-hye has a conventional corporate husband who doesn’t really like her, but married her because it was expected.  She has a bad dream and suddenly stops eating meat - and makes her husband food without meat.  He is outraged, but hopes she grows out of it.  She embarrasses him at a meal with his boss when she turns down the meat-heavy dishes.  At a following celebratory full family meal she also refuses to eat meat.  Her father (former South Korean military soldier who fought in Vietnam for the U.S….) hits her twice and tries to stuff a piece of pig down her throat. Buried in the story is that her father has been brutal to her for years. After that the husband divorces her.  

From there she starts taking her clothes off in public and engages in adulterous sex with a video artist who is infatuated with her ‘Mongolian’ birth mark, who is also her sister’s husband.  He films them having sex while both are body painted in flowers… Then she is committed to a mental institution.  Edgy!  There she stops eating and just drinking water, and from there wants to ‘live on air’ not like a plant and stops any intake whatsoever.  Her sister is sympathetic but overwhelmed.  Then Yeong-hye dies due to starvation, which is evidently the wages of vegetarianism …

The book is narrated by the block-head husband, then the long-suffering sister.  Told, not shown…

You want to read a book about a woman committing suicide?  Really?  It is not about vegetarianism at all.  This book reads like some slight attempt at a copy of 1950s American feminist fiction about the corporate IBM family life and the caged wife.  Bulls-eye for the U.S. literary mafia who work hard to avoid anything up-to-date.  Lord knows, South Korea’s middle class is a dreadful class, but the analysis is glancing.  

Where are the majority of South Koreans, many of them militant Korean workers with other issues besides vegetables?  Invisible, as usual. After all, it is a radical movement.  There must be a proletarian feminist or even a middle-class feminist in South Korea who could write a better book.  It's a book with a crazy woman.  As usual.  Probably needs to be doped up on Valium.  As usual.  Betty Friedan story, 70 years later, of retro fake progressivism and 'insight.'  A typical psychological, derivative, anti-female, dysfunctional story  … written by a woman.  A coup!  And an insult to real vegetarianism and real women.

An Iowa Writer’s Workshop® product.  And wouldn't you know it, she won the 2024 Nobel...

And I bought it at 2^nd Story Books, Ely MN.

Red Frog / July 4, 2018