Written and Illustrated by Zoe Bocquillon
Feeling stuck or lost in the agony of London’s unsympathetic cold? I suggest you take it a step further. Push your agony. Tear down the boundaries of human consciousness. Get rebellious, finally, and read The Vegetarian by Han Kang. This book is unapologetically strange and, coincidentally, written by this year’s Nobel Prize winner in Literature. It follows the story of Yeong-hye, a young woman who becomes a vegetarian. Simple enough, or maybe not so. The tediousness of everyday life and reality pushes to the destruction of married life while meditating on sisterhood. Kang tears apart all notions of social relationships to reconstruct the bleak shadows of men’s sexual violence. Women’s bodies are dissected both sexually and emotionally, rendering an intimate portrayal of what it might mean to be free and not to eat meat. Written from three perspectives, Kang grasps the reader from the start, making us barely able to breathe or think rationally. It is ritualistic, raw, and full of flowers.
