'' THE VEGETARIAN '' TAP : BOOK REVIEW

 

' THE VEGETARIAN '. BY Han Kang. Shakahari [ Urdu translation of The Vegetarian ] by Asma Hussain [Denmark]. Before that she was teaching Urdu at an American University.

HAN KANG may have been an unexpected winner of the Nobel Prize last November, but Urdu literary readers were very keen to welcome her.

The novel is unique in many ways. The protagonist, Yeong-bye, after seeing a dream, suddenly stops eating anything which has to do with animals.

This is an act of defiance in a society where being a carnivore is a norm. Her act of becoming a '' vegetarian '' has some symbolic and psychological connotations.

She was subjected to regular torture by her father, who was a war veteran. That's one explanation of why she abhors eating the animal meat which is obtained after slaughtering them. 

Her husband is a common guy, nine-to-five routine job and living a routine life, which must have bored  Yeong-hye.

The story is in three-parts, each focusing on Yeong-hye, the main protagonist, from the perspective of a different character. Yeong-hye. interestingly, seldom speaks for herself in the novel.

This aspect adds to the problem of understanding her character. This is what Han Kang wanted to convey : the impalpability of a psychologically challenged person for the common people around her..

The first part is narrated by Yeong-hye's husband. The narrative of her husband is interspersed with  Yeong-hye's dreams. These dreams are intense and filled with torturous and gory experiences.

The husband expects nothing special from his wife, but is unable to comprehend the psychological digression of his wife.

We are reminded that Yeong-hye used to draw comic speech bubbles before she became deranged.

An industrialised society lacks empathy and the impossibility of inter-human communication through speech in such a society is also one of the themes in this novel.

The World Students Society thanks Syed Kashif Raza.