![]() ![]() ![]() The Vegetarian is concerned with the seismic repercussions that follow a seemingly innocuous event: Yeong-Hye’s sudden, mysterious decision to stop eating meat. ![]() It’s a sentiment that the similarly enigmatic Yeong-Hye might have expressed as the main character in The Vegetarian by Han Kang, whose novel has been translated from Korean into English by Deborah Smith. Just before he slips into death’s embrace, he confesses to the circus overseer that the reason he was so intent on starving himself is quite simple: “I couldn’t find the food I liked.” Indeed, when his popularity abruptly peters out, and he becomes a neglected circus sideshow left to do as he pleases (soon to be replaced by a panther whose body is “furnished almost to the bursting point with all that it needed”), the hunger artist continues fasting and withering away until he is barely discernable from the stalks of dirty straw that line his cage. The sight of the “invalid repast” he is forced to eat every forty days, to the blaring accompaniment of a big band, only fills him with nausea. If it weren’t for the demands of the crowd and a domineering impresario, the hunger artist would go on fasting forever. In Kafka’s “A Hunger Artist,” the story of a man who enthralls audiences with his ability to go without eating for forty days at a time, food is a foe. ![]()
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