Some books are haunting because you can’t quite forget the images they put in your mind, but there are also books that haunt you because you feel that you are missing something terribly important, that is just out of reach. In some books this shows the limitation of the writer, but in this case, I think Kang was intentional; not quite closing the loop, not making things entirely clear and letting the reader sit in the stew of unknowing. It certainly makes this Man Booker Award winner a natural choice for a book club discussion!

Yeong-hye and her husband, Mr. Cheong live a quiet life in Korea. Married for 5 years and having just recently purchased their own home, they are now on track to start a family. But suddenly their lives are interrupted by Yeong-hye’s vivid and bloody dreams. These dreams culminate one early morning when her husband finds her standing in the kitchen with the refrigerator door open. Thinking that she is just having a nightmare he makes her lie down on the living room couch and goes back to bed, but in the morning when he gets up she has taken everything out the refrigerator and freezer and armed with large black trash bags she is methodically throwing out all the meat, fish eggs and milk away. Harried and late for work, her husband, leaves but when he returns that evening, Yeong-hye has made an entirely vegan meal and announces that she will not be cooking with anything but vegetables ever again. Not knowing what to do, Mr. Cheong, who misses eating meat, especially the way Yeong-hye use to cook it, decides to talk to Yeong-hye’s family and see if they can persuade her to change her mind. This ends in a ghastly power struggle between Yeong-hye and her father with Yeong-hye ending up in the hospital after trying to kill herself rather than submit to her father.

Kang portrays Yeong-hye’s slow decline vividly. She speaks to us only periodically, her voice almost ghostly as she tries to cope with the dreams and the memories of a horrible incident in her childhood that haunts her. Most of the story, however is told from the perspective of Yeong-hye’s husband, her sister and her brother in law, which keeps us at a distance, never quite knowing whether these narrators are reliable or merely self interested. The novel speaks not so much about the choice to be vegetarian but rather to the natural human desire to want to make choices for ourselves. It is also a heartbreaking description of a mind slowly losing itself and the way mental illness slowly overtakes a person and its inevitable impact on the whole family. The importance of this story being set in Korea should not be overlooked. The different culture, the traditional values of female subservience and respect for your elders, especially men, play a big role in this story as well as the shame the family experiences because Yeong-hye does not act the way society expects. These factors are part of the milieu in which Yeong-hye lives and are also part of the reason for her isolation and decline. Haunting and heartbreaking, this novel raises uncomfortable questions and stays with you long after you read the final page

Brenda’s Rating: *****(5 out of 5 Stars) 

Recommend this book to: Sharon, Marian, Lauren, Ken and Keith

Book Study Worthy? Highly recommend it!

Read in ebook format.