its crushing climax, a phantasmagoric yet emotionally true moment that's surely one of the year's most powerful. Exquisite - Eimear McBride, Baileys Women's Prize-winning author * A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing *Įntrancing and tense. will be hard to beat - Daniel Hahn * Guardian *Ī strange, painfully tender exploration of the brutality of desire indulged and the fatality of desire ignored. Sentence by sentence, The Vegetarian is an extraordinary experience. It is sensual, provocative and violent, ripe with potent images, startling colours and disturbing questions. It's a bracing, visceral, system-shocking addition to the Anglophone reader's diet. Mind-blowing - Eileen Battersby * Irish Times * A work of savage beauty and unnerving physicality. Most of all, it is about the emptiness and rage of discovering there is nothing to be done when all hope and comfort fails. It is about escape and how a dreamer takes flight.
is more than a cautionary tale about the brutal treatment of women: it is a meditation on suffering and grief. 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. The writing throughout is precise and spare, with not a word wasted. Winner of Man Booker International Prize 2016 (UK)
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. 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.
She unknowingly captivates her sister's husband, a video artist. His cruelties drive her towards attempted suicide and hospitalisation.
Her passive rebellion manifests in ever more bizarre and frightening forms, leading her bland husband to self-justified acts of sexual sadism. 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. 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. He is an office worker with moderate ambitions and mild manners she is an uninspired but dutiful wife. Yeong-hye and her husband are ordinary people.
0 kommentar(er)
