‘Shorn of its ceremony the body is, at best, a torn, riven thing – covered with hungry orifices.’
(Yaeger, 239)
Han Kang’s The Vegetarian is a slim book, consistently hypnotic and surreal.
This is partly because Yeong-hye, the eponymous vegetarian, spends the novel’s duration in a trance-like state. In short, the dream-logic that moves the book, its motives and outcomes, becomes hard to predict. The reader is not unlike a voyeur, moving around in the backstage passages of unwanted thoughts, and the effect is as unnerving as it is delicious.