Yeong-hye stops eating meat after a series of dreams she will not explain, and Han Kang builds a short, unsettling novel out of what that refusal does to everyone around her.
Told in three parts, each from a different vantage point, the novel watches a private decision harden into a public problem: a husband's irritation, a brother-in-law's obsession, a sister's exhaustion. Deborah Smith's English translation carries the spare, image-heavy prose that won the International Booker Prize, and the real subject is less diet than autonomy, and how little of it a person is granted before the people nearest to them intervene.
The short version:
• Three linked sections, each narrated from a different position around Yeong-hye
• International Booker Prize winner, translated from the Korean
• Compact enough to finish in a sitting, dense enough to reread
• Themes of bodily autonomy, family pressure, mental health and quiet violence
For readers of literary fiction and translated contemporary writing, available from Boipoka.
নতুন-1% ছাড়
