The Vegetarian by Han Kang (translator: Deborah Smith)

The Vegetarian is a novel about non-conformity in a highly conforming society. In the opening section of the book, Yeong-hye, an ‘ordinary wife’ decides to become vegetarian after experiencing a recurrent bad dream. The people around her, her husband and wider family, do not understand. Apparently it is uncommon in South Korean society for people other than Buddhist monks to become vegetarian. What follows are three connected stories, beginning with Yeong-hye then moving on to her brother-in-law and then her sister. Each is affected by Yeong-hye’s vegetarianism is slightly different way.

The story begins with Yeong-hye, as described by her husband: “Before my wife turned vegetarian, I’d always thought of her as completely unremarkable in every way.” Yet what follows is the story of a woman who is anything but unremarkable. Yeong-hye suffers from extremely vivid and disturbing dreams. Dreams of blood and slabs of meat, dreams of sucking down blood, blood on her skin and clothes. These dreams drive Yeong-hye to become a vegetarian; she can no longer face eating meat and can barely sleep, she is so unsettled by them. Her husband reacts without understanding, he can only see that Yeong-hye is behaving strangely and this strangeness is quite the opposite of what her husband desires. Instead he desires a plain and ordinary life. Yeong-hye’s behaviour does not fit into this.

That Yeong-hye’s husband and her family find her switch to vegetarianism disturbing becomes quite apparent very quickly. What I found disturbing as a reader was the reaction to Yeong-hye’s choice: no one attempts to understand her, they only seek to force her to comply. In the case of her husband, this means ignoring the problem and trying to ignore Yeong-hye, as he describes here:

“I sometimes told myself that, even though the woman I was living with was a little odd, nothing particularly bad would come of it. I thought I could get by perfectly well just thinking of her as a stranger, or no, as a sister, or even a maid, someone who puts food on the table and keeps the house in good order.    “

This ignorance descends into marital rape, which her husband describes in such a matter of fact way it made me feel slightly sick. In the case of Yeong-hye’s family their approach to her refusal to eat meat is an attempt at force feeding, followed by physical violence on the part of her father, which results in Yeong-hye slitting her wrist with a fruit knife. Consequently Yeong-hye is admitted to hospital and, following this, a mental institution. By this time Yeong-hye is desperately thin and emotionally distant. No one can reach her, and she clearly doesn’t want to be reached by anybody.

The story then moves to Yeong-hye’s brother-in-law, an artist who becomes sexually obsessed with Yeong-hye. He confesses to have always been more attracted to Yeong-hye than his wife, and his wife’s casual mention of Yeong-hye’s ‘Mongolian Mark’ on her back send him spiraling into an obsession over which he has no control. This obsession takes the form of a particular sexual fantasy: the idea of painting Yeong-hye’s body with flowers and recording someone (himself) having sex with her. He cannot get this vision out of his mind. Against his instincts, he approaches Yeong-hye (now released from the mental institution and reintegrating into society) and asks her to model for his art. To his surprise, she agrees. Though his motives are sexual in nature, he is surprised at his own reaction to Yeong-hye once he has painted her:

“Only then did he realize what it was that had shocked him when he’d first seen her lying prone on the sheet. This was the body of a beautiful young woman, conventionally an object of desire, and yet it was a body from which all desire had been eliminated. But this was nothing so crass as carnal desire, not for her – rather, or so it seemed, what she had renounced was the very life that her body represented.”

Eventually he follows through on his desire, finally recording himself having sex with Yeong-hye. It is at this point his activity is discovered by his wife In-hye. Both Yeong-hye and he are captured and sent to a mental institution.

Here the story turns to In-hye as she tries to come to terms with what has happened in her own life, and the slow descent into madness of her younger sister Yeong-hye. In-hye’s story is the least impassioned of the three, and perhaps the most poignant. In-hye reflects on Yeong-hye’s state as she visits the hospital on the day they attempt to insert a feeding tube into Yeong-hye’s nose. By this point Yeong-hye is convinced she has transformed from something human into a plant, that she need only plant herself by her hands into the cool soil of the forest for her transformation to be complete. We see In-hye struggling between what she is supposed to do (force feed Yeong-hye) and what Yeong-hye wants her to do (let her go). She reminisces on their childhood, the way in which Yeong-hye had been abused by their father and her cowardice in never confronting it. As though she could. This culminates in a realization that the whole of her life, she had never really lived. As she describes here:

“The feeling that she had never really lived in this world caught her by surprise. It was a fact. She had never lived. Even as a child, as far back as she could remember, she had done nothing but endure.”

These three stories, approaching the subject in very different ways, show three characters undergoing a process of self-discovery, of transformation. Each character confronts the social norm, and finds themselves set against it. In the case of Yeong-hye the process is violent, disturbing and ultimately self-defeating. Is she mad? It is a question the book neither asks nor answers. Yet Yeong-hye represents the person standing at odds with the social contract, the silent promise we each make not to rock the boat, not to be too individual, to behave in accordance with the wishes of others. In the case of her brother in law, it is his sexual desire which is at odds with the world; his desire to take part in a physical union which is extraordinary and consuming. In-hye desires only to live, but is restrained by fear from doing so. Only in the end, and through the extremity of Yeong-hye’s actions is she able to let go.

The Vegetarian is an astonishing book, powerful and magnetic and deeply disturbing. I found it inspiring and terrifying in equal parts; in particularly Yeong-hye’s story which, seeming so ordinary from a ‘western’ viewpoint, the way in which the people surrounded her reacted is perhaps a sadly familiar story. There was a disturbing lack of understanding, a lack of desire to understand which was driven solely by the need for things to go on as painlessly as possible. Yeong-hye forces those around her, reader included, to consider what it means to live, and not just to live but to live a life which has meaning and personal service, not just for the good of others. A read as extraordinary as its cover (which is stunning).  

A Woman in the Polar Night by Christiane Ritter (Translator: Jane Degras)

I was directed towards this book in reading Sara Maitland’s marvellous A Book of Silence earlier in the year, though it has taken me a while (as always) to get around to reading it. A Woman in the Polar Night is the self-penned account by Christiane Ritter, an Austrian housewife, of her year spent with her husband and another hunter, Karl, in Spitsbergen (otherwise known as Svalbard) in 1934. They lived for the year in a tiny cabin, no more than ten feet by ten feet in size, in the inhospitable environment on the outcropping called Grey Hook in the extreme North. Ritter left behind her child in order to spend the year with her husband in this uncommon situation. Having a love of all things icy and snowy, a particular affection for stories of endurance and adventure, I was probably a long way towards loving this book even before I started reading. Fortunately for me, it didn’t disappoint.

Ritter is initially breezy about her plans, dismissing the kindly (but interfering) advice of the men on the ship, each of whom expresses discomfort at the idea of her, a woman, living in the Arctic for a year. However, she soon begins to understand what they meant and her first impressions are definitely on the side of less than impressed as she describes:

“Stones, stones. Everywhere sleeping and waking, I see stones. I feel they are becoming an obsession. The stony land, the whole monstrous barrenness, clings to me like a bad dream.

Europe is already left far behind. It seems to me now like a magic land. Flowers and fruits grow out of the earth there. Out of the earth grows what man needs in order to live. Here, where nothing grows, I grasp for the first time the whole tremendous miracle of eternally growing food.

Secretly, though I do not wish to speak of it, I come to believe we shall die of hunger here, or at least of scurvy…”

She openly expresses her shock at the apparently laid back approach of the men, who seem to be assured that they will be able to source plenty of food. Soon, however, she is wolfing down the seal that the men are able to shoot and despite her initial reluctance she learns to accept the hunters life, the sparseness and the strange, bleak lifestyle.

What we see, then, in Ritter is a transformation and it is beautiful. She moves quickly from hating her new environment to a blissful, wondrous love. There is something ecstatic about the way she speaks of her new home, though it is doubtless that she experiences suffering, fear and a test of the limits of her endurance. She becomes lost on the ice, she seeks to protect the Arctic foxes that the men have come to hunt, she hears voices and spends weeks alone in the darkness and violence of an Arctic storm. Despite this, she learns to love and appreciate the beauty of her new, spartan home. As she describes here in what became my favourite chapter, chapter 8 – Peace After the Storm:

“It has become quite clear. A lofty, greenish-blue evening sky arches over the snowy landscape of the fiord. Like a shell opalescing in its own shadowy hues, the earth is floating in transparent space, in which light from distant fountains stirs and floats to and fro. Low on the eastern horizon there is a round, bright pool of light, blueish-pink in colour, the reflection of the sun, now slowly circling the earth far below our horizon. We ourselves live in shadow.

But it is as though things up here have acquired a light of their own, as though they themselves emitted rays of the most beautiful and mysterious hues. All the mountains, tremendous in the foreground and sharply edged in the distance are glassy-bright with rigid ice, glass bright the foreland and glass bright the cliffs along the shore that, transfigured by frost and surf into high, round domes of ice, drop steeply into the sea.[…]

I myself stand forlornly by the water’s edge. The power of this worldwide peace takes hold of me, although my senses are unable to grasp it. And as though I were insubstantial, no longer there, the infinite space penetrates through me and swells out, the surging of the sea passes through my being, and what was once a personal will dissolves like a small cloud against the inflexible cliffs.”

Ritter writes beautifully of a transformative experience with such wonder and ecstasy that I defy anyone not to want to spend a year in the Arctic, in the cold and isolation, after reading this book. What Ritter describes is an experience so awe inspiring and unique that it was life changing, that after her year in the Arctic she was a changed person but changed for the better. She had a new respect for nature, she had a love of quiet and solitude and a changed perception of her old life. As she describes here:

“As we go on with our conversation, we find ourselves pitying all the people in the towns of Europe, particularly the housewives, who besides being worn out by the unending struggle against soot and dust, moths and mice, also feel themselves obliged to keep up appearances. And then we talk about the aesthetic pleasures of Europe, which when we were there seemed so priceless to us – music, for example, that elevates the mind and lightens the heart and without which we could hardly live. Remarkably enough, the hunger for music is quite absent here. Our hearts are light, our minds are in a permanent state of elevation. Nature seems to contain everything that man needs for his equilibrium.”

It is an astonishing book. Written with simplicity and honesty, Ritter is matter of fact about her experience whilst transmitting something of such frail and incomparable beauty that I found myself quite envious of her experience. It is a gripping and mesmerising story, told with wonder and skill. A beautiful read, and one which I’ll return to over and over. A book which deserves to be much more widely known.

A Woman in the Polar Night receives a spellbound 10 out of 10 Biis. 

The Lover by Marguerite Duras (translator Barbara Bray)

The Lover is a fictionalised biographical work by Duras, recounting her first love affair with an older Chinese man during her childhood in Indochina. Duras was fifteen when the affair began, an affair deemed illicit due to her age and their difference in race. The novel captures the period during which the affair ran its course, though in truth its range is broader than that, capturing the period as a kind of distillation of the course of Duras’s life. It is apparent the affair had a significant impact on her, and the novel gives a very frank assessment of that period and its consequences.

Duras writes with sparse economy and a keen, insightful wisdom. There is a great deal unsaid in the book, and yet a complete picture is given of the relationship, its flaws, Duras as a naïve yet calculating young lover. It is quite a disturbing read, not because of the nature of the relationship, their age difference and racial differences, but the ways in which the young Duras takes advantage of her lover, treats him badly and, to a degree, herself, the level of hatred and dismissal from both herself and her family against the backdrop of his reverence and gentleness. The lover is from a rich family, he cannot marry Duras both because she will not allow it and because his father will not either. Duras, in contrast, lives in poverty. Her father has died and her mother has lost what money they had on a bad land deal, her elder brother is a drain (she refers to him, often, as the ‘murderer’ due to her perception of his guilt in the younger of the two brothers’ death which occurs after the time frame in which the story is set) and the younger brother seems unfit for study though it is apparent Duras loves him greatly. That at fifteen Duras sets out, it appears, to find herself a rich lover in order to supplement their income, perhaps, is not surprising and though the family openly disapprove, on another level her behaviour is sanctioned. As she explains:

“The only thing left is this girl, she’s growing up, perhaps one day she find a way to bring in some money. That’s why the mother lets the girl go out dressed like a child prostitute. And that’s why the child already knows how to divert the interest people take in her to the interest she takes in money. That makes her mother smile.”

There’s a strange directness and indirectness to this novel. On the one hand much is left out, a great deal is unsaid. On the other hand, there is a brutal kind of honesty, Duras does not shirk from laying responsibility for her behaviour at her own door. She admits how terribly she treated her lover, how she used him, how mercenary she was, how he knew it, how her family knew it, how the affair had no future and no end, how she did not love him (or thought she didn’t) how it marked and damaged them both, in Duras’s case for life it seems. Is it something she is sorry for? Yes, the novel professes her sorrow, not for the relationship but perhaps for the way it was conducted and the way that it ended. As she says:

“And I’ll always have regrets for everything I do, everything I’ve gained, everything I’ve lost, good and bad, the bus, the bus-driver I used to laugh with, the old woman chewing betel in the back seats, the children on the luggage racks, the family in Sadec, the awfulness of the family in Sadec, its inspired silence.”

All through the novel, Duras’s perceptiveness, her wisdom, shines through. It is a piece of fiction / non-fiction in which each paragraph provides its own weight, could be read, interpreted, analysed in great depth. It is a slight book, yet one which benefits from more than one reading due to its density, a density which is not apparent due to the sparse simplicity of Duras’s prose. In fact it is very easy to read the book lightly, to dismiss it as a simple love story. It is so much more than that. It is, I think, an explanation of Duras’s life in which she addresses her flaws, her difficulties, why and how she drank, why and how she turned to writing, how she manipulated herself and others, her independence, her single-mindedness, the terrible way in which she shaped her life story. Except there is no life story, as she says here:

“The story of my life doesn’t exist. Does not exist. There’s never any centre to it. No path, no line. There are great spaces where you pretend there used to be someone, but it’s not true, there was no one.

It is a melancholy book, filled with regret. At the same time it is defiant. Duras does not express any desire to have lived any other way, she seeks only to explore the fundamental truth of her existence; a truth she has buried in a childhood half forgotten, brought to life again in this short, but impactful novel. Her life encapsulated in a single image, the image of herself at fifteen crossing the Mekong river, her lover-to-be on the other side.

The Lover receives a confused but impressed 8 out of 10 Bii’s.  

Days in the History of Silence by Merethe Lindstrøm (translator Anne Bruce)

There is something quite arresting in the style of Days in the History of Silence. It has a particularly soft voice, a reflective tone, a sense of much unspoken, a kind of selfless absence. Yet it is a story all about the self, the loss of self, what makes the self, the point at which the self can become undone, from which it can never be rebuilt. It is a beautiful, sad novel which makes you think. 

The story is narrated by Eva, an older women whose husband, Simon, has stopped speaking. The source of his ‘silence’ is a question around which the story revolves. It is not clear, not ever made clear, if this is simply a matter of age, a deterioration of the brain, Altzheimers, perhaps, or a stroke, or a choice Simon has made to withdraw into silence. This is the question that occupies Eva throughout the novel.

In the course of exploring Simon’s silence we discover a history of silences, both Simon’s and Eva’s. These are silences which have dictated the course of their combined history. Simon’s silence centres around his childhood, as a Jewish child growing up during the war Simon (Shimon) was forced into hiding and silence in order to survive. Yet his silence about his past continued, shared only with Eva. His history, the fact of his Jewishness, is something about which neither of them speak even to their children. Having had silence imposed on him through hatred, Simon continues this silence to the point of extremity. Perhaps, then, it is the self-imposed silence which leads to his silence now?

Then there is Eva, her own silence generates from giving up her child, a son, that she had before she and Simon met, with whom she could not generate any kind of bond and who she gave up with apparent relief. When she told Simon about her son, Simon who had lost his own family in death camps and war, he is ashamed of her and encourages her to seek him out. Yet she does not. Even so, she tends the grave of a stranger in the local church and, at times, appears to desire to speak about the boy that she lost to the local pastor. Yet she does not. Silence is ingrained in both Eva and Simon to the point that not speaking becomes the norm.

The final core silence centres around their cleaner, Marija, an immigrant from Latvia who becomes central to their lives and yet they dismiss suddenly and with apparent ease. The reason for her dismissal is another secret, a source of silence. It is a silence heaped on other silences, the source of a gulf between Eva and Simon and their children.

What emerges from these silences is the consequence of keeping secrets, a history of silent shame centring around events that neither party could control or about which they should feel any shame. Yet once the secret, the silence, begins it becomes almost impossible to undo it. Both Eva and Simon make attempts, like here where Eva discovers a letter in a book that Simon gave to their daughter Helena:

“I think about this letter to his colleague now that I am reading what he has attempted to write to his daughters. For the letter is to them. I can see that he has tried, he has really tried to formulate something, and if they had opened it they would have seen his handwriting and these attempts to describe, to impart, to pass something on, to them. To Helena and her sisters. But he cannot. He has to give up, it is a long time since he was clever at that. It is only a rough draft, a sheet of paper he has left their all the same. Dear Helena, Greta and Kirsten, he writes, I have something I – He gives up. A fresh attempt, He is sorry that it has taken so long, he is sorry about it all. He writes that he first bought paper for a letter, that the storekeeper misunderstood, he got the wrong kind. Today the first signs of summer are here, he writes, the summer is going to be fine, I do think so. And I hope that you all manage to have a vacation. Mother and I both consider that you work too hard. But I have always worked too hard myself, so it is obviously hereditary, that kind of thing. Now I have decided to tell you something I have neglected to say for far too-

I can’t manage to interpret the continuation of the sentence, it is nearly rubbed out because of a faulty pen. But I believe the final word is long. Far too long. My girls, he continues, you have become so big. So grown up. He starts over again, trying to find an introduction.

I become angry. I become angry because he has decided to tell them on his own, without having talked to me about it first.”

There is a sense, here, that Eva is angry with Simon and yet also that she suspects Simon’s withdrawal is a sign of his anger towards her. That she has forced him to keep his secret, that their combined silence has prevented him from being honest about who he is. Yet at the same time, perhaps she is angry because Simon has withdrawn into his silence, accepted it, whereas Eva still desires to confess.

It is a complex, softly spoken and well crafted book. It leaves a lot unsaid, as the best fiction often does. Consequently, it is a book that stays with you, that leaves you to ruminate on it, secretly and in silence, for days afterwards.

Days in the History of Silence receives a secretive 9 out of 10 Bii’s.