New around here? Register your SA Forums Account here!

You can: log in, read the tech support FAQ, or request your lost password. This dumb message (and those ads) will appear on every screen until you register! Get rid of this crap by registering your own SA Forums Account and joining roughly 150,000 Goons, for the one-time price of $9.95! We charge money because it costs us money per month for bills, and since we don't believe in showing ads to our users, we try to make the money back through forum registrations.
 
  • Locked thread
gorbonic
Feb 13, 2014

Lunchmeat Larry posted:

The brother says he doesn't know why he's attracted to her because she's less conventionally attractive than his wife, so I don't think it's just the husband's perspective, but I suppose it ultimately reinforces the same point

Lunchmeat Larry posted:

Anyway, 2/3 through and this is a good book and insanely hosed up. I'm wondering if there's any significance to her seemingly becoming more attractive to men as she sheds her humanity, when she was initially described as fairly plain. Also if there's anything to J refusing to have sex w her
I'm on board with the interpretation that it is the "something different" in her that makes her both more attractive and more repulsive to the POV characters in parts 1 and 2. I imagine that in that restaurant scene with the husband's boss (~ pp. 28-33), if she had a more specific reason than "I had a dream," the "something different" would vanish, and she would become just another health-conscious or ethics-conscious vegetarian. The enigmatic dream aspect is part of what gives the book its symbolic and pretty direct emotional power. The unconscious often acts like a unstoppable but ambiguous imperative.

Not sure I like where the book goes in part 3, but I'm not articulate enough to say why. It seems like it was building up in the first two parts and then felt like a much softer coda rather than a climax or proper ending. But I was totally taken in by the writing throughout (good on the translator), and was glad I read it. I would be curious to hear more thoughts about the third section.
---
A few vaguely related bits: I read in the Slate review that this book was originally written and published as three stand-alone pieces, and I believe it. You could split reading it into three days or three parts of a day. Also, the publisher (Hogarth) is kind of new in town, and seems to concentrate on the weird side of prestigey stuff like this. They did Michel Faber's last (and maybe final) book and have a series of Shakespeare remixes.

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

gorbonic
Feb 13, 2014

Lunchmeat Larry posted:

...I feel like the last third was generally a bit... muddled? ... it lacked the clarity of purpose of the first two parts, though, with the narrative straying in random directions and even feeling a bit farcical/silly at points (the handstands). I'm finding it unfortunately hard to articulate, wondering if anyone felt the same way.

I probably sound a bit over-critical, I still really loved it, probably one of the best books I've read this year.

Totally missed this. Yep, agreed, including the hard to articulate part, but I like how you put it. It was getting more intense between parts one and two, and then it seemed like Kang didn't quite know what to do next.

gorbonic
Feb 13, 2014
I found this in the jacket copy:

"Like Malazan, Han Kang's The Vegetarian was written by multiple authors and fuses numerous plotlines into a fantasy epic running over the course of thousands of years. If you have a taste for 'blood and bone,' you'll munch right into The Vegetarian!"

gorbonic
Feb 13, 2014

Abalieno posted:

Some stuff about (1) Eastern exoticism and (2) the safe, haughty superiority of some naive readers to predatory male characters, etc.
I don't think you read the same book as other people here.

On the first point about the distancing of those crazy weird Koreans: The characters are portrayed in a more or less modern Western-style light. Is it because they eat bulgogi or something? I mean, it's "exotic" the same way Kafka is exotic or Kazuo Ishiguro's The Unconsoled is exotic, and the former wrote in German while the latter is super-English. If anything, the Korean cultural stuff makes the male characters MORE sympathetic and believable. For instance, when the husband is trying to rationalize his wife's behavior, he mentions that her behavior would be rational for Buddhist priests, to lose weight, to "alleviate certain ailments" like indigestion, or to be "possessed by an evil spirit." This kind of list has a touch of the Other about it, but only enough to reinforce the clarity of the husband's thinking. He is the one making sense within his context. His thinking enters a strange tension with the wife's choice -- it makes us want to understand her behavior more.

As for the second point about a distanced superior not-Fair and Balanced glance at evil unsympathetic males: The book does a lot of work to give the men's behavior some sense. See above. I get it when the husband says (p. 20): "What the hell? So all because of some ridiculous dream, you've gone and chucked out all the meat? Worth how much?" In the next section, the brother in law grimaces when he realizes that Yeong-hye is in his fantasy. But he is still slave to that fantasy (just as she is slave to her dream), and this intersects with the kind of art he knows he must make. "He spent a long time searching for a solution, for a way to free himself from the hold this image had on him..." That is also comprehensible.

  • Locked thread