영국식 [pʌl|seɪt] 다른 뜻(1건) 예문보기 영국식 예문보기 영국식 예문보기Han Kang’s “The Vegetarian”
Reviewed by Lori Feathers
There is a primal side in each of us, one that disrespects social norms, has needs, makes demands. In her remarkable novel, The Vegetarian, South Korean writer Han Kang explores the irreconcilable conflict between our two selves: one greedy, primitive; the other accountable to family and society.
“Existence precedes essence” is a central tenet of Jean-Paul Sartre’s philosophy—first a human exists and then she creates her essence, the values and meanings that define her as human. The Vegetarian’s heroine, Yeong-hye, gradually sheds her essence, emotionally isolating herself. She devolves into something that exists without meaning, like a plant or animal, and in doing so she ignores the societal norms that require a suppression of the primal.
The Vegetarian consists of three long chapters that were originally published in Korea as separate novellas. Yeong-hye is the focal point of each chapter, and when read together the narratives fashion a novel that is greater than the sum of its parts. Yeong-hye’s husband, Mr. Cheong (referred to as such throughout), narrates the first chapter. In choosing a mate, Mr. Cheong sought a woman who would be unassertive and bland. And at least initially, Yeong-hye does not disappoint:
She was a woman of few words. It was rare for her to demand anything of me, and however late I was in getting home she never took it upon herself to kick up a fuss. Even when our days off happened to coincide, it wouldn’t occur to her to suggest we go out somewhere together. While I idled the afternoon away, TV remote in hand, she would shut herself up in her room. . . . only at mealtimes would she open the door and silently emerge to prepare the food. To be sure, that kind of wife, and that kind of lifestyle, did mean that I was unlikely to find my days particularly stimulating.
Everything in their staid lives changes when, prompted by a dream, Yeong-hye stops eating meat, and persists in her abstention despite pressure from Mr. Cheong and her family, not relenting even in the face of the awkward social situations that result. So strong is Yeong-hye’s vegetarian conviction that she attempts suicide after an altercation in which her father uses physical force to shove meat into her mouth. The second chapter is narrated from the point of view of Yeong-hye’s brother-in-law (whose name is never shared with the reader), a video artist, who never gave Yeong-hye much thought until his wife makes the casual comment that Yeong-hye has a birthmark on her buttock. From that point forward he becomes obsessed with incorporating Yeong-hye’s birthmark into his art. The final chapter takes place three years after the opening of the novel. Yeong-hye is now in a psychiatric hospital, and her sister In-hye is the only member of the family who has not abandoned her. At this point Yeong-hye refuses all food, causing In-hye to feel helpless in the face of her sister’s self-imposed starvation. In-hye experiences her own emotional crisis when, prompted by a recurring dream, she abandons her husband and young son one night while they are asleep.
Yeong-hye, her sister, and her brother-in-law all experience dreams or visions in which they see their own reflections distorted, their faces altered or obscured. This recognizable but distorted self is the primal self, and while only Yeong-hye surrenders herself completely to it, both In-hye and her husband give in only temporarily to its seductions. In-hye envies her sister’s total surrender:
She was no longer able to cope with all that her sister reminded her of. She’d been unable to forgive her for soaring alone over a boundary she herself could never bring herself to cross, unable to forgive that magnificent irresponsibility that had enabled Yeong-hye to shuck off social constraints and leave her behind, still a prisoner.
Apart from its very imaginative plot, what excels in The Vegetarian is the consistent vitality and sensuality of Kang’s writing, the quality and rhythms of which shine through in Deborah Smith’s excellent translation. Kang’s language pulsates with color, texture, taste, and emotion:
First he [her brother-in-law] swept up the hair that was falling over her [Yeong-hye’s] shoulders, and then, starting from the nape of her neck, he began to paint. Half-opened buds, red and orange, bloomed splendidly on her shoulders and back, and slender stems twined down her side. When he reached the hump of her right buttock he pained an orange flower in full bloom, with a thick, vivid yellow pistil protruding from its centre. He left the left buttock, the one with the Mongolian [birth]mark, undecorated. Instead he just used a large brush to cover the area around the bluish mark with a wash of light green, fainter than the mark itself, so that the latter stood out like the pale shadow of a flower.
Every time the brush swept over her skin he felt her flesh quiver delicately as if being tickled, and he shuddered. But it wasn’t arousal; rather it was a feeling that stimulated something deep in his very core, passing through him like a continuous electric shock.
Even the sensation of silence pierces the reader’s consciousness and is palpably felt in Kang’s hands:
When she spread out the food on the table in the visiting room, Yeong-hye would silently go through the motions of chewing and swallowing, like a child diligently tackling homework. If she tucked Yeong-hye’s hair behind her ears her sister would look up at her and smile quietly. These were the moments when there might have been nothing at all the matter, the moments that never failed to lighten her heart.
In The Vegetarian, brothers and sisters, husbands and wives, are all inscrutable to one another. After In-hye leaves her husband, she reflects:
Had she ever really understood her husband’s true nature, bound up as it was with that seemingly impenetrable silence? She’d thought, at one time, that it might be revealed in his work; in his video art In fact, before she met him, she hadn’t even been aware that such a field of art existed. Despite her best efforts, though, his works proved incomprehensible to her. Nothing was revealed.
The failure to comprehend the very people with whom we should be closest is an underlying theme of the novel. Kang punctuates our erroneous faith in the ability to understand one another by silencing Yeong-hye and instead allowing her story to be told by her husband, her sister, and her brother-in-law. Their inability to “know” Yeong-hye creates frustration, disillusionment, and isolation. only In-hye, who, in the midst of her own personal crisis, rejects the temptations of the primal, ultimately finds some meaning in Yeong-hye’s choices. Kang’s provocative novel calls into question our reliance on others for emotional sustenance when the primal side of our natures remains always unpredictable, always incomprehensible.
Read more: http://www.wordswithoutborders.org/book-review/han-kangs-the-vegetarian#ixzz49j3ZP38o
다른 뜻(1건) 예문보기AWARDS
Man Booker International PrizeWINNER 2016
PRAISE
“Surreal…[A] mesmerizing mix of sex and violence…vivid, chiseled…Like a cursed madwoman in classical myth, Yeong-hye seems both eerily prophetic and increasingly unhinged.” —Alexandra Alter, The New York Times
“Ferocious…[Han Kang] has been rightfully celebrated as a visionary in South Korea… Han’s glorious treatments of agency, personal choice, submission and subversion find form in the parable. There is something about short literary forms – this novel is under 200 pages – in which the allegorical and the violent gain special potency from their small packages… Ultimately, though, how could we not go back to Kafka? More than ‘The Metamorphosis,’ Kafka’s journals and ‘A Hunger Artist’ haunt this text.” —Porochista Khakpour, New York Times Book Review
“Astonishing…Kang viscerally explores the limits of what a human brain and body can endure, and the strange beauty that can be found in even the most extreme forms of renunciation.” —Entertainment Weekly
“Sometimes how a book or a film puzzles you—how it may mystify even its own creator—is the main point. The way it keeps slithering out of your grasp. The way it chats with you in the parlor even as it drags something nameless and heavy through the woods out back….That’s the spirit in which to approach The Vegetarian…The structure of The Vegetarian registers as devotional, a triptych that moves its title character closer and closer to a destructive transcendence that, in turn, infects those closest to her…The novel transmits a feeling of great stillness even as its characters undergo convulsions of rage, sorrow, and lust….While the characters often don’t understand the source or meaning of their own feelings, they can always identify them, and Kang states them in a straightforward style that will remind many of Haruki Murakami…By the time her sister sits down in a hospital chair beside her haggard frame, and Yeong-hye triumphantly announces, ‘I’m not an animal anymore,’ she has gone far past fretting about the pressures on women in Korean society, or any society for that matter. The Vegetarian has an eerie universality that gets under your skin and stays put irrespective of nation or gender.”—Laura Miller, Slate.com
“This book is both terrifying and terrific.”—Lauren Groff, New York Times bestselling author of Fates and Furies
“The Vegetarian is one of the best novels I’ve read in years. It’s incredible, daring, and stunningly moving. I loved it.”—Laura van den Berg, author of Find Me
“If it’s true you are what you read, prepare to be sliced and severed, painted and slapped and fondled and broken to bits, left shocked and reeling on the other side of this stunning, dark star of a book.”—Amelia Gray, author of Gutshot
“It takes a gifted storyteller to get you feeling ill at ease in your own body. Yet Han Kang often set me squirming with her first novel in English, at once claustrophobic and transcendent… Yeong-hye’s compulsions feel more like a force of nature… A sea like that, rippling with unknowable shadow, looks all but impossible to navigate—but I’d let Han Kang take the helm any time.”—Chicago Tribune
“Provocative…shocking.”—The Washington Post
“This is a deceptive novel, its canvas much larger than the mild social satire that one initially imagines. Kang has bigger issues to raise… The matter of female autonomy assumes urgency and poignancy.”—The Boston Globe
“Compelling…[A] seamless union of the visceral and the surreal.”—Los Angeles Review of Books
“Indebted to Kafka, this story of a South Korean woman’s radical transformation, which begins after she forsakes meat, will have you reading with your hand over your mouth in shock.” —O, the Oprah Magazine
“If you love books that grab you by the throat and keep you wide-eyed and shocked throughout, you’ve got to pick up Han Kang’s The Vegetarian.”—EW.com
“A complex, terrifying look at how seemingly simple decisions can affect multiple lives…In a world where women’s bodies are constantly under scrutiny, the protagonist’s desire to disappear inside of herself feels scarily familiar.”—VanityFair.com
“A sharply written allegory that extends far beyond its surreal premise to unexpected depths.”—The Millions
“Visceral and hypnotic.”—Michele Filgate
“An elegant tale, in three parts, of a woman whose sudden turn to veganism disrupts her family and exposes the worst human appetites and impulses… [a] stripped-down, thoughtful narrative… about human psychology and physiology.”—Huffington Post
“Adventurous readers will be blown away by Han Kang’s The Vegetarian, in which a once-submissive Korean wife’s compulsion to stop eating meat spirals out of control. This moving story engages complicated questions about desire, guilt, obligation and madness.”—MOREMagazine
“This elegant-yet-twisted horror story is all about power and its relationship with identity. It’s chilling in the best ways, so buckle in and turn down the lights.”—Elle.com
“The Vegetarian is the first—there will be more, let’s hope—of Han Kang’s novels to arrive in the United States…The style is realistic and psychological, and denies us the comfort that might be wrung from a fairy tale or a myth of metamorphosis. We all like to read about girls swapping their fish tails for legs or their unwrinkled arms for branches, but—at the risk of stating the obvious—a person cannot become a potted bit of green foodstuff. That Yeong-hye seems not to know this makes her dangerous, and doomed.”—Harper’s Magazine
“This haunting, original tale explores the eros, isolation and outer limits of a gripping metamorphosis that happens in plain sight… Han Kang has written a remarkable novel with universal themes about isolation, obsession, duty and desire.” —Minneapolis Star Tribune
“Complex and strange…Han’s prose moves swiftly, riveted on the scene unfolding in a way that makes this story compulsively readable…this is a book that demands you to ask important questions, and its vivid images will be hard to shake. This is a book that will stay with you.”—St. Louis Post-Dispatch
“Brutally yet beautifully explores the gap between one person’s ｅxpression and another’s reception.”—Harvard Crimson
“The Vegetarian is incredibly fresh and gripping, due in large part to the unforgettable narrative structure… Han Kang has created a multi-leveled, well-crafted story that does what all great stories do: immediately connects the unique situation within these pages to the often painful experience of living.”—The Rumpus
“Disquieting, thought-provoking and precisely informed.” —Shelf Awareness
“A horror story in its depiction of the unknowability of others—of the sudden feeling that you’ve never actually known someone close to you….Its three-part structure is brilliant, gradually digging deeper and deeper into darker and darker places; the writing is spare and haunting; but perhaps most memorable is its crushing climax, a phantasmagoric yet emotionally true moment that’s surely one of the year’s most powerful. This is an ingenious, upsetting, and unforgettable novel.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“[A] spare, spectacular novel…Family dysfunction amid cultural suffocation is presented with elegant precision, transforming readers into complicit voyeurs. Fans of authors as diverse as Mary Karr and Haruki Murakami won’t be able to turn away.”—Library Journal (starred review)
“Korean writer Han Kang’s elegant yet unsettling prose conveys her protagonist’s brother-in-law’s obsessive, art-centered lust; her sister’s tepid, regret-riddled existence; and Yeong-hye’s vivid, disturbing dreams… Readers will want more of the author’s shocking portrayals of our innermost doubts, beliefs, and longings.”—Booklist
“[A] beautiful and disquieting new novel…concise and swift, its language often almost poetic…haunting.” —Bookpage
“The book insists on a reader’s attention, with an almost hypnotically serene atmosphere interrupted by surreal images and frighteningly recognizable moments of ordinary despair. Han writes convincingly of the disruptive power of longing and the choice to either embrace or deny it, using details that are nearly fantastical in their strangeness to cut to the heart of the very human experience of discovering that one is no longer content with life as it is. An unusual and mesmerizing novel, gracefully written and deeply disturbing.”—Kirkus
“Searing…[Yeong-hye’s] extreme efforts to separate herself from her animal appetites reveal the sanity and normality of those closest to her to be mere matchstick houses.”—Helen Oyeyemi, author of Boy, Snow, Bird
“Suffused with a sensibility that evokes the matter-of-fact surrealism of Franz Kafka, featuring a female protagonist as engagingly perverse as Melville’s Bartleby, Han Kang’s slender but robust novel addresses many vital matters—from the politics of gender to the presumptions of the male gaze, the conundrum of free will to the hegemony of meat—with a dark élan that vegetarians and carnivores alike will find hypnotic, erotic, disquieting, and wise.—James Morrow, author of Galápagos Regained
“A strange, painfully tender exploration of the brutality of desire indulged and the fatality of desire ignored, rendered all the more so by Deborah Smith’s exquisite translation.”—Eimear McBride, Baileys Women’s Prize-winning author of A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing
“Visceral and terrifying, The Vegetarian is a startling reminder of the utter unknowability of another’s mind. Nonetheless, reading it, you will feel it in your flesh: the desire for peace, a plea for safety, for escape from your own inevitable mortality. It is artfully plotted yet reads like a fever dream, sweeping and surreal. It will leave you aching.”—Sarah Gerard, author of Binary Star
“Like a small seed, Han Kang’s startling and unforgettable debut goes to work quietly, but insistently. Her prose is so balanced, so elegant and assured, you might overlook the depths of this novel’s darkness—do so at your own peril.”—Colin Winnette, author of Haints Stay and Coyote
“The Vegetarian is a story about metamorphosis, rage and the desire for another sort of life. It is written in cool, still, poetic but matter-of-fact short sentences, translated luminously by Deborah Smith, who is obviously a genius.”—Deborah Levy, author of The Unlovedand Swimming Home
“The Vegetarian is hypnotically strange, sad, beautiful and compelling. I liked it immensely.”—Nathan Filer, 2013 Costa First Novel award-winning author of The Shock of the Fall
“A stunning and beautifully haunting novel. It seems in places as if the very words on the page are photosynthesising. I loved this graceful, vivid book.”—Jess Richards, Costa First Novel Award shortlisted author of Snake Ropes
“Poetic and beguiling, and translated with tremendous elegance, The Vegetarian exhilarates and disturbs.”—Chloe Aridjis, author of The Book of Clouds
“Dark dreams, simmering tensions, chilling violence…This South Korean novel is a feast…It is sensual, provocative and violent, ripe with potent images, startling colors and disturbing questions…Sentence by sentence, The Vegetarian is an extraordinary experience… [It] will be hard to beat.”—The Guardian
“This is an odd and enthralling novel; its story filled with nihilism but lyricism too, its writing understated even in its most fevered, violent moments. It has a surreal and spellbinding quality, especially in its passage on nature and the physical landscape, so beautiful and so magnificently impervious to the human suffering around it.”—Arifa Akbar, The Independent
“This short novel is one of the most startling I have read… Exciting and imaginative…The author reveals how nature, sex and art crash through this polite society…It is the women who are killed for daring to establish their own identity. The narrative makes it clear it is the crushing pressure of Korean etiquette which murders them…[A] disturbing book.”—Julia Pascal, The Independent
“Immediately absorbing…The different perspectives offered are so beautifully distinctive…Every word matters.”—Sunday Herald
“Shocking…The writing throughout is precise and spare, with not a word wasted. There are no tricks. Han holds the reader in a vice grip…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 Vegetarian is more than a cautionary tale about the brutal treatment of women: it is a meditation on suffering and grief. It is about escape and how a dreamer takes flight. Most of all, it is about the emptiness and rage of discovering there is nothing to be done when all hope and comfort fails….A work of savage beauty and unnerving physicality.”—Irish Times
“The Vegetarian is a book about the failures of language and the mysteries of the physical. Yet its message should not undermine Han’s achievement as a writer. Like its anti-protagonist, The Vegetarianwhispers so clearly, it can be heard across the room, insistently and with devastating, quiet violence.”—Joanna Walsh, The New Statesman
“[A] strange and ethereal fable, rendered stranger still by the cool precision of the prose… What is ultimately most troubling about Yeong-hye’s post-human fantasies is that they appear to be a reasonable alternative to the world of repression and denial in which everyone around her exists.”—Times Literary Supplement
“The Vegetarian is so strange and vivid it left me breathless upon finishing it. I don’t think I’ve ever read a novel as mouth-wateringly poetic, or as drenched in hypnotic oddities, taboos and scandal. It seems to have been plucked out of the ether, ready-made to take us all by surprise. Exciting and compelling”—Lee Rourke, New Humanist
“The Vegetarian is so strange and vivid it left me breathless upon finishing it. I don’t think I’ve ever read a novel as mouth-wateringly poetic, or as drenched in hypnotic oddities, taboos and scandal. It seems to have been plucked out of the ether, ready-made to take us all by surprise”—New Internationalist
“The Vegetarian combines human violence and the possibility of innocence…[A] frightening beauty of a novel.” -British Council Literature
“Uncanny.”—The Australian
“Kang belongs to a generation of writers that aim to discover secret drives, ambitions, and miseries behind one’s personal destiny…[The Vegetarian] deals with violence, sanity, cultural limits, and the value of the human body as the last refuge and private space.” -Tiempo Argentino
“[A] bloodcurdlingly beautiful, sinister story.”—Linda
“The almost perverse seduction of this book originates in the poetry of the images. They are violently erotic and rather nightmarish; the novel is like a room full of large flowers, where the musky odour takes you by the throat.”—De groene Amsterdammer
“For the fans of Haruki Murakami.”—Gazet van Antwerpen (starred review)
“Piercing… I was touched the most by the directness, the images, the poignant phrases and most of all the imagination with which it was written.”—nrc Handelsblad
“The Vegetarian has an odd kind of silent power, which makes you want to finish it in one go and continue to think about it.”—nrc Handelsblad (starred review)
“A shocking, moving and thought-provoking novel.”—Trouw
“Outright impressive.”—HUMO
“One of the most impressive novels I have read recently… You need to read this book.”—Arnon Grunberg in De Volkskrant
“The Vegetarian is exciting and original.”—De Standaard der Letteren(starred review)