The book tackles mental illness and the world of psychiatric hospitals, but also family dynamics and how your parents’ behavior when you were a child can have dramatic consequences on your own adult development. Her decision takes devastating dimensions, not unrelated to some strange traits of her personality, somewhat dormant before that.Īctually, each main character in the book has some type of psychological issue. In the first story, the writing alternates between her husband’s narration of how things unravel, and Yeong-hye’s dreams, memories, and thoughts, like a journal, in italics in the text. One day, because of a dream she had, Yeong-hye feels obsessively compelled to become a vegetarian – actually details in the books seem to imply to me she is more accurately a vegan. Each story focuses on Yeong-hye, from the perspective of her husband, her brother-in-law, and finally her sister. The Vegetarian is weird, and gets weirder and weirder through the three stories. For sure, there’s no comparison of difficulty between Korean and English, but still, it makes me more comfortable when I think I am too anal double checking too many words myself when I translate novels into French. It was also quite reassuring to hear Deborah Smith confess she basically checked out every word in her dictionary. What are they doing there? What’s their secret? I have yet to read an author who went through this training and that I don’t admire. I was not surprised to discover than Han Kang went through the Iowa writing workshop. I enjoyed listening to both author and translator. Are translators finally started being recognized as real authors as well? It’s about time.īesides, it was quite encouraging to learn that all the translators of the short list were rather new translators, some unknown, who had even landed into literary translation almost by accident for some. It is wonderful to know that the winners of this literary translation award share the prize money between author and translator. I followed live the ceremony for the Man Booker Prize International and rooted for The Vegetarian, as it had also been chosen as the winner by the shadow panel. I devoured it in no time, but then, it got stuck on my review list, so here it is finally, months after it received the Man Booker International Prize. And of course, it got stuck on my shelf behind books to read urgently for tours and the like. I received The Vegetarian months ago through Blogging For Books.
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