This is a quote from the book The Vegetarian by Han Kang, translated by Deborah Smith.
Have you read this book? I’d love to hear your thoughts in a comment below!
If you’re interested, you can read an excerpt from the book here.
The Vegetarian – Summary
Here is the book summary from Goodreads:
Yeong-hye and her husband are ordinary people. He is an office worker with moderate ambitions and mild manners; she is an uninspired but dutiful wife. 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. 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. Her passive rebellion manifests in ever more bizarre and frightening forms, leading her bland husband to self-justified acts of sexual sadism.
His cruelties drive her towards attempted suicide and hospitalisation. She unknowingly captivates her sister’s husband, a video artist. 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.
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.
Note, you may want to check trigger warnings before reading this book. You can find some details on the book’s trigger warnings here.
Copyright © 2016 by Han Kang.
Translated by: Deborah Smith
More details can be found on Goodreads and on StoryGraph.
