Michael Barnes
This novel was first published in 2007, been made into a film and then translated in 2017 went on to win a slew of awards including the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2025. In an interview the author Hyan Kang has explained her goals, noting that her novel is a treatise about patriarchy in South Korean society and the role of women overall in her culture.
The picture it paints is not a pleasant one.
Told in three parts it opens with Yeong-Hye an average-appearing and unassuming South Korean woman, a housewife and part-time cartoonist after a dream she declares she will no longer eat meat to the point where she begins to look unhealthy, where she cannot be around meat and can no longer bear the smell of those who consume meat including her husband, who deploys her own family against to get to eat meat. Her father tries to physically force her to eat meat which sees her end up in hospital.
The second is told from the focus of her older married sister successful in business, whose husband Yeong-Hye's brother-in-law a video artist who becomes physically obsessed with Yeong-Hye and her birth mark (referred to as a Mongolian Mark) which leads to Yeong-Hye being committed to a hospital for care of her overt eating disorder. The final third's focus is on her sister whose husband fled after his behaviour and she is the only family that visits Yeong-Hye in the hospital.
"The novel brims with a strangely disturbing beauty especially when describing the Brother-in-law’s obsession. Han Kang’s writing is sparse but almost poetic and intense, translated into English with stunning precision by Deborah Smith. The imagery is often dreamlike, and the symbolism—particularly of plants, blood, and animals—adds to the surreal quality of the narrative" - Cindy D’Silva and Noor Anand Chawla at Blogaberry Dazzle.
After reading this I felt like asking South Korea "are you okay?"
This novel was first published in 2007, been made into a film and then translated in 2017 went on to win a slew of awards including the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2025. In an interview the author Hyan Kang has explained her goals, noting that her novel is a treatise about patriarchy in South Korean society and the role of women overall in her culture.
The picture it paints is not a pleasant one.
Told in three parts it opens with Yeong-Hye an average-appearing and unassuming South Korean woman, a housewife and part-time cartoonist after a dream she declares she will no longer eat meat to the point where she begins to look unhealthy, where she cannot be around meat and can no longer bear the smell of those who consume meat including her husband, who deploys her own family against to get to eat meat. Her father tries to physically force her to eat meat which sees her end up in hospital.
The second is told from the focus of her older married sister successful in business, whose husband Yeong-Hye's brother-in-law a video artist who becomes physically obsessed with Yeong-Hye and her birth mark (referred to as a Mongolian Mark) which leads to Yeong-Hye being committed to a hospital for care of her overt eating disorder. The final third's focus is on her sister whose husband fled after his behaviour and she is the only family that visits Yeong-Hye in the hospital.
"The novel brims with a strangely disturbing beauty especially when describing the Brother-in-law’s obsession. Han Kang’s writing is sparse but almost poetic and intense, translated into English with stunning precision by Deborah Smith. The imagery is often dreamlike, and the symbolism—particularly of plants, blood, and animals—adds to the surreal quality of the narrative" - Cindy D’Silva and Noor Anand Chawla at Blogaberry Dazzle.
After reading this I felt like asking South Korea "are you okay?"