Reading The Vegetarian by Han Kang, Man Booker International Prize 2016

The Vegetarian by Han Kang

Han Kang is a South Korean writer. She was born in a family of writers and novelists, her brother and brother being also writers. Her novels The Vegetarian and Human Acts are her first translated works in English by Deborah Smith. In 2016 her novel The Vegetarian won Man Booker International Prize and she is the first Korean author to be nominated for the award.

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This book is so strange and weird at the same time. It's th first time I am reading any Korean literature in translation, so I cannot judge it too much. In short, it's the story of a woman named Yeong-hye who decides to become a vegetarian and how her family reacts to this decision. The novel is divided into three parts, each told from the point of view of a person who is impacted by her decision.

The first part is narrated by her husband who describes her as plain looking and who chose her because she was unremarkable in every possible way. Then she suddenly had a dream. A rather bloody dream that turn her away from meat and all animal products. In the second part we see her through the eyes of her brother-in-law, an unsuccessful video artist who struggles to create some vague pornographic visions. He sees her in a total different way, an enigma with a strong sense of self-posession and sexually attractive. Finally, in the third part we see her complete transformation, her struggle with mental illness and how this affected her sister. In her sister's view she is altogether a victim and a manipulator, a psychiatric patient who is so capable of controlling those around her.

It is not a novel about becoming vegetarian. It is more about obsessions, acting on obsessions and family relations. Despite being a novel about Yeong-hye we never hearher perspective. It is also a novel that makes you react against abuse, either physical or psychological, family relations and societal norms. The writing is so impactful and heartbreaking. So, I'd say take 24 hours, read the novel and then make up your mind, is it reasonable, provocative or it leaves you helpless?

Why we should all be feminisits by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

This is my first Adchie reading. It was such a great and fun read. A short and effective essay on Feminism and gender and why it is so important even today. If you download it on your kindle, it will take you about half an hour to read it!

Adchie was born in Nigeria in a family of six children. At 19 she leaves her home to the USA to study Communication at

Drewel University in Philadelphia. She is best known for her novels Purple Hibiscus published in 2003 and nominated for The Man Booker Prize in 2004, Americanah published in 2013 and Half a Yellow Sun published in 2006.

This essay is so perfectly written and presented in a simplistic manner without any touch of negative humour thrown in to engage a live audience. Adchie is part of the new wave of speakers making feminism more accessible. A self proclaimed "happy feminist who does not hate men, who likes lipstick, high heels for herself but not for men", she adds a much needed touch of humour to the topic and addresses the ridiculous stereotypes of a feminist.

She presents male/female differences clearly. Her example of cooking fit perfectly. Women are not born with a cooking gene and yet they are expected to do so. Still, men are top chefs, making most of the money. Evolution and culture? Male figures grow stronger and more aggressive. And culture is the result of behaviors and beliefs that describe a certain group. It's people who make culture and not the other way around.

We should all read this from highschool teenagers, University students, adults, men and women. It should become an obligatory study part of the curriculum. We should all be feminists.

We should all be feminists by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Favorite fragments from the book: 
1. “The problem with gender is that it prescribes how we should be rather than recognizing how we are. Imagine how much happier we would be, how much freer to be our true individual selves, if we didn’t have the weight of gender expectations.” 

2.“We spend too much time teaching girls to worry about what boys think of them. But the reverse is not the case. We don’t teach boys to care about being likable. We spend too much time telling girls that they cannot be angry or aggressive or tough, which is bad enough, but then we turn around and either praise or excuse men for the same reasons. All over the world, there are so many magazine articles and books telling women what to do, how to be and not to be, in order to attract or please men. There are far fewer guides for men about pleasing women.” 

3.“A woman at a certain age who is unmarried, our society teaches her to see it as a deep personal failure. And a man, after a certain age isn’t married, we just think he hasn’t come around to making his pick.” 

4.“We teach girls shame. “Close your legs. Cover yourself.” We make them feel as though being born female they’re already guilty of something. And so, girls grow up to be women who cannot say they have desire. They grow up to be women who silence themselves. They grow up to be women who cannot say what they truly think. And they grow up — and this is the worst thing we do to girls — they grow up to be women who have turned pretense into an art form.” 

Living on Mars

After so much coffee, spaceships, Martian tea, Martian potatoes, physics, chemistry and botanics, I am finally done with you Martian by Andy Weir! They say the film is better, we'll just have to wait and see!

Reading now: Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin

"When David meets the sensual Giovanni in a bohemian bar, he is swept into a passionate love affair. But his girlfriend's return to Paris destroys everything. Unable to admit to the truth, David pretends the liaison never happened - while Giovanni's life descends into tragedy.

United by the theme of love, the writings in the Great Loves series span over two thousand years and vastly different worlds. Readers will be introduced to love's endlessly fascinating possibilities and extremities: romantic love, platonic love, erotic love, gay love, virginal love, adulterous love, parental love, filial love, nostalgic love, unrequited love, illicit love, not to mention lost love, twisted and obsessional love." (text from the cover of Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin, Penguin Great Love, August, 2007)

Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin

Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin:

I told her that I had loved her once and I made myself believe it. But I wonder if I had. I was thinking, no doubt, of our nights in bed, of the peculiar innocence and confidence which will never come again which had made those nights so delightful, so unrelated to past, present, or anything to come, so unrelated, finally, to my life since it was not necessary for me to take any but the most mechanical responsibility for them.

Another book I've just finished this week is Giovanni's Room written by James Baldwin in 1956. It is a novel that focuses on the life of an American expatriate man, David, living in Paris and his feelings and frustrations in his life, particularly in his relationship with Giovanni, an Italian bartender he had met in a Parisian bar.

James Baldwin tended to write controversial novels, in which he explores different themes such as social alienation, homosexuality, race and class distinctions. Narrated in first person singular, the novel is deep and dark, making the reader feel David's emotions and passions.

Giovanni's room is about a man, David, who lives in Paris. He and his girlfriend Hella are at the point where they need to figure out whether they're going to get married or not. He proposes to her and instead of saying yes right away, she leaves him and goes to Spain. While she is gone, David meets an Italian man named Giovanni and they have an affair. This is not the first homosexual experience David had. He had one when he was younger and this caused a lot of problems in his life, he seems to be denying that part of himself.

The best part about this book is that it was published in the 1950's. The book stirred up a great deal of controversy when it was released. As an African American writer, Baldwin was already rebelling against social prejudices of his time. Now, by writing about his sexuality, Baldwin's publisher feared that he would even further alienate his audience/both black and white.

In Giovanni's Room, David feels ashamed of being gay. It's the 50's and his family and society are not ready to accept his sexual orientation, and neither is David. The fact that he is gay is obvious, yet he manages to trick himself over and over again until everything becomes public and he is forced to confront the truth. This is not a gay novel, it is a story about love and feeling, about loneliness, homelessness and the burden of our own choices. Most of all, it's a book about how really difficult it to live and enjoy freedom, without feeling always wrong and always in need of an escape. There is a passage that I liked very much: “Do you know how you feel?” (Giovanni asked David). And to this David answers: “I feel nothing now, nothing.” David's inability and unwillingness to be honest about his feelings undermine his relationship with others and ultimately leaves him profoundly alone.

The novel suggests more hopefully that the loss of innocence, if accepted, can be the beginning of a journey that leads to knowledge.

The story takes place as a flashback over the course of one evening in a rented house in the south of France before David will take the train back to Paris the next morning. Drinking by himself in the large, empty house and looking at the window, David recalls a statement from a friend named Jacques: “Nobody can stay in the Garden of Eden.” This is an idea which frames the novel and perhaps offers David one way to understand his life.

When the world comes to an end...the dystopian novel

The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

"We slept in what had once been the gymnasium. The floor was of varnished wood, with stripes and circles painted on it, for the games that were formerly played there; the hoops for the basketball nets were still in place, though the nets were gone. A balcony ran around the room, for the spectators, and I thought I could smell, faintly like an afterimage, the pungent scent of sweat, shot through with the sweet taint of chewing gum and perfume from the watching girls, felt-skirted as I knew from pictures, later in miniskirts, then pants, then in one earring, spiky green-streaked hair. Dances would have been held there; the music lingered, a palimpsest of unheard sound, style upon style, an undercurrent of drums, a forlorn wail, garlands made of tissue-paper flowers, cardboard devils, a revolving ball of mirrors, powdering the dancers with a snow of light."

One of the latest books I have just finished reading is "The Handmaid' s Tale by Margaret Atwood. Since I did not have too much time to read it, I've downloaded the audio version and listened to it on my phone. The story is read by Joanna Davis, a British actress best known for her television work: Sense and Sensibility, Bleak House, or the 1995 BBC TV series Pride and Prejudice. Listening to Joanna Davis (one of my favorite actresses) added so much credibility to the novel. I've decided to read (listen to) this novel first because it is a first-person narrative (and I love this kind of books) and secondly because I am interested to read more about dystopian novels, after reading “Never Let Me Go” by Ishiguro.

This story if one the best examples of dystopian novels, similar to George Orwell's 1984, or Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Novels of this type present imagined worlds and societies that are not ideal, but instead are terrifying and restrictive. Atwood wrote this story in the mid 1980's after the elections of Ronald Reagan in the USA and Margaret Thatcher in Great Britain, during a period of conservative revival in the West, influenced by the so-called movement of religious conservatives who criticized what they thought were the excesses of the “sexual revolution” of the '60s and '70s.

In the novel Atwood explores the consequences of a reversal of women’s rights. In the new Republic of Gilead (former USA), a group of conservative religious extremists had taken power and a new society is founded on a “return to traditional values”.Women in Gilead are forbidden to vote, to read or write. It is a picture of a totalitarian society world undone by pollution and infertility.

It is the story of a handmaid named Offred (which means “of Fred”) who is the main narrator of the book. We never find out her real name but we have detailed descriptions of how she went from a partner (married to Luc) and mother to a surrogate, controlled and repressed by an extreme religious and patriarchal ruling elite. The handmaids are the class of women used solely for their reproductive functions.

What I have found very intriguing about this book, is the way the author makes use of biblical allusions and how she plays on the idea of basing a society's morality on the morality of the Bible. Gilead (coming from Genesis 31:21) is used in the Bible to refer to a mountain region east of the Jordan River. The handmaids were sent to the Rachel and Leah Re-education Center to train for the position of handmaid and it becomes clear that this Gileadean story of the handmaids comes from the story of Rachel and Leah found in Genesis 29:35. Rachel and Leah, the two wives of Jacob, give their maids to Jacob so can have more children through them. This biblical story is read by the husband to his wife and handmaid before they all engage in a strange fertility ritual (how ackward is that?)

So the book takes ideas from the religious right- that women should return to the home, that men are the rightful “head” of a household, that women shouldn't have access to birth control and that women’s right of an education and career are to blame for a declining birth rate and the corruption of society.

Offred serves the Commander and his wife Serena Joy (another symbolical name), a former gospel singer and an advocate for “traditional values”. Every month when she is near her menstrual cycle, she must have impersonal, wordless sex with the Commander, while Serena sits behind her, holding her hands. Offred's freedom is completely restricted. She can leave the house only on shopping trips and the Eyes (Gilead's Secret Police Force) watch her every move. Even her name consists of the word “of” followed by the name of the Commander. Another important detail about Offred is about her dress- she wears all the time a heavy red dress-a fact that denotes her rank in society.

The novel ends with an epilogue from 2195, after Gilead has fallen written by Professor Pieixoto. We find out that Offred managed to escape, but we are not given any details as to where she had gone or what she had done after her escape.

It is amazing how after more than twenty years after its publication there are elements of the story that have become true. The most obvious connection is with many issues regarding women's rights and religious fundamentalism that take place in the Middle East.

It was a heavy book, not a very pleasant one to read or listen to. It took me a while to get used to the narrative line. However, I strongly recommend it if you like dystopian novels and also because it is one of the fewest dystopian novels that actually depicts real life.