This spare, strong and affecting novel transporting the reader to South Korea won the Man Booker International Prize this year.  A small story with huge reach and impact, it tells the story of a married woman (‘the most ordinary woman in the world’) who rejects her body because of the violence done to it by the world – by her angry father, her blockhead of a husband, the ordered society in which she is an unappreciated, meaningless cog.  

Yeong-hye lives a loveless life, reading and dreaming and tending to her  drunken husband, an ugly specimen of callous mediocrity.  She is shaken from this numbed existence by a shocking blood-filled dream full of terrifying faces, which recurs to torment her.   Her abrupt decision to reject meat is also a rejection of the brutality of humankind; this simple decision spirals into a dramatic and brutal denouement.  

Yeong-hye’s urgent need to return to a kind of primal innocence eventually destroys both her and her family: when her father tries to force her to eat meat, she self harms.  Her brother-in-law’s erotic fascination with her ruins his life and marriage.  Her sister’s orderly and luxurious life falls apart.  In the psychiatric hospital where the emaciated woman refuses to eat - doctors force feed her in painful scenes – she attempts literally to be uprooted from humankind and become a plant or tree.  Her death – intuited but not seen - is foretold from the very beginning of the novel. 

Told in three voices, the book started life as a short novella about a woman becoming a plant.  In 2007 Han Kang published it in the form of three linked novellas (a common form in Korean literature).  The narrative voice shifts from the repulsive blockhead to the artist brother-in-law who is driven to paint her emaciated body (and his own) with flowers and plants to achieve the sexual catharsis he then films.  Yeong-hye’s suppressed eroticism surfaces in this surreal and troubling section.  The final third, in which Yeong-hye descends into silence and an unwavering death wish, is narrated by her sister, Kim In-hye.  In-hye is profoundly affected by the pain she witnesses and brought to question the point of her own life.

This sounds harrowing but is not:  the tone remains extremely calm.  The three narrators' accounts mesh beautifully.  Driven by their own needs, they illustrate both the innate violence of human beings and Yeong-hye’s desperate need to preserve dignity.  The result is compulsive reading, an important novel suffused with dread, pain, eroticism and self-harm. 

A further remarkable aspect of this painful but rewarding book is the story of its translator, Deborah Smith.  A monolingual (her description) Yorkshire girl fascinated with reading, she taught herself Korean (as one does) in order to become a literary translator.  She explained this to The Guardian:

 “As The Vegetarian was my first translation I had no idea how any aspect of the process worked, let alone what I would do day by day. Having spent most of my life reading, and making no distinction between work in translation and in English, I decided after graduating that I would learn a language and become a literary translator. I chose Korean partly for pragmatic reasons, because I knew the country had a lively literary scene, but in fact I had read nothing from there before, because there were no translations. Rather optimistically, I put on my Twitter bio that I was a translator, and eventually I suggested The Vegetarian to a publisher, who asked me to translate it.” 

She is clearly both a remarkable translator and a woman of tremendous resolve and application.  In a 2015 interview Smith told The Quietus that “I taught myself the first year course while I was on the dole, then moved to London to do an MA at SOAS, which led straight into a PhD. Finally submitted last September!” Last year, with a start up grant from Arts Council England (“God bless them”) Deborah Smith founded publishing house, Tilted Axis Press, dedicated to authors from Asia with a feminist standpoint.  Deborah Smith has also translated Han Kang’s Human Acts, which I shall review shortly.