The Vegetarian by Han Kang (2015, translated from the Korean by Deborah Smith , first published 2007)

The Vegetarian by Han Kang wins the 2016 International Booker Prize Award

       Translator Debra Smith.                                      Han Kang

" there is the kind of seriousness whose trademark is anguish, cruelty, derangement. Here we do accept a disparity between intention and result. I am speaking, obviously, of a style of personal existence as well as of a style in art; but the examples had best come from art. Think of Bosch, Sade, Rimbaud, Jarry, Kafka, Artaud, think of most of the important works of art of the 20th century" from Notes on Camp by Susan Sontag

The Vegetarian by Han Kang is a shockingly, violent,  deeply disturbing account of tne events that ensue when the very normal unremarkable wife of an average Korean corporate employees, against all cultural norms, has a dream which causes her to become a vegetarian.  The work has received very well deserved highly laudatory reviews in major publications. .  I will at once say I think Han Kang is an important new writer for those of us in the Anglophone literary world.  As i read the finely crafted beautifully translated work I was brought to mind Susan Sontag's discussion of a sensibility she called "The Literature of Cruelty".  (Her examples are above, in the 21st century I think we can add Roberto Bolano's 2666). I want here to reflect a bit on the place this set in modern Seoul work has among the European pre World War II classics mentioned by Sontag.

The Vegetarian has three sections.  In the opening segment we meet Yeong-Kye and her husband.  The story takes place in a society which values conformity, where one gets along by going along.  Then the couple's life is totally transformed when the wife has a dream which she sees as a message directing her to become a vegetarian.  The dream sequences are very striking, hard to understand and opened ended, as a dream piece should be.  I see the dream as opening the wife to the vision of her world built on murder, cruelty, purification and a thinly disguised Hobbesian struggle for dominance.  By eating meat she is somehow signifying her acquiescence  in these horrors, as if she were an accomplice to a crime, preventing her from speaking out.  The wife begins to lose weight, her husband tries to tell her humans require meat, it is necessary for survival.  In one horrific very vivid scene the husband is invited for the first time to have dinner at a banquet for top employees at his corporation, potentially a big career move up  for him.  The huge problem is the numerous courses of meats, exquisitely prepared that will be served.  If his wife will not eat, she will be seen as insulting her hosts.  This section of the novel has a horrific close.  It is as though the wife cannot bear the inherent cruelty that is the seeming price of society.  She is driven mad by this or uses madness to hide from a reality she is not equipped to articulate. 

The second segment is centered on the brother in law of Yeong-Hye, married to her sister.  He is an artist who has developed a sexual fixation on his sister in law centering on a birthmark.  He imagines her body and convinces her to allow him to paint her nude, not as depicting her but with her as the canvas.  I am not sure I understand how this as triggered by her conversion to vegetarianism or my placing the story in the literature of cruelty but I am sure it is all tied in.  

Yeong's parents and her sister are all very worried about her.  They see her refusal to eat meat as a repudiation of their way of life, of their family history and symptomatic of a potentially suicidal  breakdown.  Section three's most exciting segment is a family reunion dinner.  The father of the sisters is very upset over his daughter's refusal to eat meat.  Something very brutal and cruel is done to Yeong in an effort to return her to carivoire status.  

I don't want to tell a lot of the plot of this work.  It, to me, can be read as an indictment of a society built on death, on the murder of the natural world from which humans arose.  Yeong is not at all an intellectual who has derived her position from reflections.  She herself cannot really understand why she can no longer eat meat.  She retreats into madness as her only escape.  

The Vegetarian is a deeply disturbing work.  It is compulsive reading.  It can, I think, also be seen as a work about the nature of families, about conformist pressures, and deeper down into atavistic roots suggesting to be human, to live, is to murder.  It can be seen as dealing with the impact of life in a huge incredibly crowded hive life city in a very consumer status driven society built on all following social norms. 

The Vegetarian will stay with you for a long time.  

I strongly endorse this book and hope to read more of her translated works. 

Han Kang was born in Gwangju, South Korea, and moved to Seoul at the age of ten. She studied Korean literature at Yonsei University. Her writing has won the Yi Sang Literary Prize, the Today's Young Artist Award, and the Korean Literature Novel Award. The Vegetarian, her first novel to be translated into English, was published by Portobello Books in 2015, and her second novel to be translated into English, Human Acts, will be published by Portobello in 2016. She currently teaches creative writing at the Seoul Institute of the Arts.  - from the publisher's webpage.

Portobello Books is one of the leading publishers of works in translation, important nonfiction, debut works by promising writers as well as  books by leading contemporary authors, including Nobel and Booker Prize Winners.   In just a few minutes on their very well done webpage I added numerous works to my "to be read" list.   

Mel u

"Love in the Market Place" by Yiyun Li (2005, from A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, 2005 Frank O'Connor Prize Winner)

Official bio from author's web page

Yiyun Li grew up in Beijing and came to the United States in 1996. Her stories and essays have been published in The New Yorker, Best American Short Stories, O Henry Prize Stories, and elsewhere. She has received fellowships and awards from Lannan Foundation and Whiting Foundation. Her debut collection, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, won the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, PEN/Hemingway Award, Guardian First Book Award, and California Book Award for first fiction; it was also shortlisted for Kiriyama Prize and Orange Prize for New Writers. Her novel, The Vagrants, won the gold medal of California Book Award for fiction. She was selected by Granta as one of the 21 Best Young American Novelists under 35, and was named by The New Yorker as one of the top 20 writers under 40. MacArthur Foundation named her a 2010 fellow. She is a contributing editor to the Brooklyn-based literary magazine, A Public Space. She lives in Oakland, California with her husband and their two sons, and teaches at University of California, Davis.

If you want to read stories by the very best contemporary writers, one decent idea  is  Frank O'Connor International Short Story winners works.  Yiyun Li won  in 2005 for her debut collection, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers.   I have previously posted on her superb novel The Vagrants and some of her short stories, all set either in contemporary China or related settings.  

"Love in the Market Place" is set in Beijing.  It centers on a female school teacher.  She loves the movie Casablanca and plays it for every class.   I love that movie also and I liked the teacher once I read that. She thinks the movie has strong ethical lessons to teach about keeping your promises.  Ten years ago she was jilted by a man who ended up moving to America with another woman.   She is completely single.   I liked her even more when I learned her only real comfort in life were a small collection of classic novels,  "works one could spend a life time studying", she bought in college.  Her mother makes hard boiled eggs and sells them in a train station, she has been doing this for forty years.  She prides her self on the care she takes to make the very best of hard boiled eggs.  Her daughter tells her why bother no one will take notice.   Her mother has big news for her.  The man who jilted her ten years ago is now divorced and is back in town.  Her mother pushes her to throw her self at the man.  She resists.  The conversations between mother and daughter are brilliant.  

The ending is remarkable, for some strange reason it made me think of Kafka's "The Hunger Artist".  The ending perplexed and disturbed me as I struggled to take it in.  This is a great short story.  I will post on more of her work, I hope.  

"Settlers" - A Short Story by Rebecca Lee - From Bobcat and other Stories (2013)

My Posts on the Short Stories of Rebecca Lee

"This old house, belonging to my friends Lesley and Andy, had been built in 1904 in a neighborhood that pretended it was on solid ground—old, Victorian homes with pillars and porticoes—but if you stepped through the screen door into the garden out back, you could feel the sand under your feet, and despite Lesley’s beautiful mazes of trees, you could tell the ocean had been here not long ago, and would be again." From "Settlers" by Rebecca Lee

A while back I read and posted on two short by Rebecca Lee.  I really liked both of these stories, I was able to read them online.  I wanted to read more of her works but I could not find any more of her work online.  I hesitate to buy collection and anthologies of short stories as I am kindly given way more collections than can ever read and I keep getting more.  I suppose I could turn the offers of free books down but I like free books to much to do that and any book could be a masterwork.  I do look at every book I am given and I post on what works for me and The Reading Life. 

Yesterday I found that Rebecca Lee's collection Bobcat and other Stories was marked down from $10.95 to $1.95.  I have learned these mark downs are often short term so I bought the book.  I will be reading and perhaps posting on the stories in the collection I have not yet read.  

Lee writes about educated urban often academically employed people.  "Settlers" focuses on the relationships of two women, over the course of a few years.  As you can see in the opening paragraph i quoted above, it is about living on shifting sands.  In "Settlers", set in 1998 in New York City, people write essays  about the rock opera Tommy and are experts on Vietsmese cooking.  The dissect the personalities of all those they knew.  Lee conveys a great deal in a few pages. 

I read this story twice and greatly enjoyed it.  

Mel u

Rosamond Lehmann- Reflections Upon completing My Read Through of her Work With my Recommendations

  Invitation to the Waltz is a novel almost without flaw: delicate in structure, beautifully written, minutely observed, moving and frequently very funny. Undoubtedly  Rosamond’s best work, it is on this and on its distressing sequel, The Weather in the Streets, that her reputation must ultimately rest. Alone of all the Lehmann novels, Invitation is light and optimistic in tone, its inspiration drawn not from disappointment and betrayal but from the prospect of love requited and future contentment. Significantly, it is also the most outward-looking, least self-concentrated of Rosamond’s novels, written during that brief period of time when she was fulfilled in her marriage, anticipating years of happiness with Wogan, of bringing up children, and of productive work; as for Olivia and Kate, so for her: everything was about to begin.  Selina Hastings in Rosamond Lehmann A Life

                                                         1904 to 1990

• Dusty Answer (1927)
• Invitation to the Waltz (1932)
• The Weather in the Streets (1936)
• No More Music (1939)
• The Ballad and the Source (1944)
• The Gipsy's Baby & Other Stories (1946)
• The Echoing Grove (1953)
• The Swan in the Evening: Fragments of an Inner Life (1967) (non-fiction)
• A Sea-Grape Tree (1976)

Rosamond Lehmann is one of the great English between the world wars novelists.  She focuses on the country l  upper class, in which she grew up, most often focusing on the romantic lives of women.  Her by far best works are Invitation to the Waltz and The Weather in the Streets, no wonderful novels, a pure delight for readers.

I decided to read all of the fiction of Lehmann through a combination of reasons.  Amazon recommended to me Rosamond Lehmann A Life by Selina Hastings.  I read and greatly enjoyed this book.  It places her in the context of England between the wars and shows her connections to the many distinguished literary figures in the era.  At the same time i was reading this book I reread from long ago The Rhetoric of Fiction by Wayne Booth in which he talks about how authors achieve their effects. (This is a brilliant book and I recommend it to anyone with a serious interest in the novel.). Booth offers lots of illustrations of his ideas but he suggests that interested readers don't take his examples but read works of fiction not mentioned in his book to see if they are illuminating for us. After reading Hastings' book, I checked for Lehmann's works on Amazon.  Only her memoir The Swan in the Evening: Fragments of an Inner Life seems even in print.  Then through a very fortuitous contact, I was given kindle editions of all nine of her books, forthcoming from Open Media Press.  The books are not very  long, none much over 250 pages so, beginning with her acknowledged master work, Invitation to the Waltz, Selina Hastings calls it a "perfect novel" and I loved it, I decided to read them all.

On a  perhaps a bit waggish note, one could say Lehmann characters are often the sort of people Saki writes about in his satirical short stories.  Everyone has servants.  I found through the focus Booth gave me an appreciation of the artistic sophistication of Lehmann.  Her narrative methods are a mixture of devices, many of the sentences, even in the lesser novels, are pure gems.  The middle chapter of Invitation to the Waltz is just hilarious, a perfect presentation  of the persons at a country dance.  The depiction of the pretentious young poet down from Oxford made me laugh out loud as I marveled at what a wonderful scene I was witnessing.  

As of right now, most readers will not find it easy to acquire her out of print works.  My guess is they will soon be back in print as Kindle editions but this is just my guess.  

Rosamond Lehmann, at her best, is a great writer.  Perhaps her very serious involvement with spiritualism after the death at 26 of her daughter Sally impacted her literary productivity but Invitation to the Waltz and The Weather in the Street, a sequel, belong on any serious lover of the novel life time list.

Mel u

"The Ballerina and the Body" - A Short Story by Alfred Doblin, 1925, Author of Berlin Alexanderplatz (translated by Damion Searles)

"She went to the hospital the next day. In the carriage she sobbed with rage beneath her blanket. She wanted to spit on her suffering body, she jeered at it bitterly; it disgusted her, this bad flesh whose company she was bound to. Her eyes widened with muted fear when she looked at these limbs now eluding her. How powerless she was, oh how powerless she was."  

My Post on Berlin Alexanderplatz by Alfred Döblin 

Berlin Alexanderplatz by Alfred Döblin (1878 to 1957) is Weimer Germany's greatest literary work.  It is considered to be the first German literary work to use techniques of James Joyce, an influence acknowledged by Döblin.  Döblin was a practicing neuro-psychiatrist.  He left Germany just before his books were burned.  

A bit more than a year ago I read Berlin Alexanderplatz by Alfred Döblin.  If you want to experience life  in Weimer Germany, read this work of genius.  I was very happy to be given a DRC by The New York Review of Books of a forthcoming collection  of his short stories.  There is a generous selections of stories in the collection, ranging from three to fifty pages.  In the advance edition I have there is no first publication data.

"The Ballarina and the Body" is a very hard edged story. The subject of the story was placed in a Ballarina company at age eleven. At the time of the story girls were placed with Ballarina companies partially as a way of "getting them of the family ledger" and also in the hopes they would find a rich husband or benefactor. The original readwrs of the story would have known this, even if modern readers might not.  At age eighteen the girl is injured terribly, she is sent to a hospital where she will undergo every painful tteatments.  She feels the doctors and others see her as of no value as she can no longer dance.  She comes to hate her body.  The ending is very powerful.

"As before, when she had thrown cold water over everything voluptuous in the dance, when her taut body had wavered like a flame, she wanted to feel her will again. She wanted to dance a waltz, a wonderful sweet waltz, with the one who had become her master, with the body. With a movement of her will she could take him by the hand once again, this body, the slothful beast, and fling it down, fling it around, and it was her master no more. A triumphant hate churned up from inside her—it didn’t go to the right and she to the left, but she, they, they leapt together. She wanted to roll him on the ground, the hobbling dwarfish barrel, trundle it head over heels, stuff sand in its maw."

I hope to read all of the short stories in the collection.

Mel u

Rosamond Lehmanm Three Set in Rural England World War Two Fictions (written 1943 to 1946)

"The wartime stories, all three commissioned by John for New Writing, are moving, funny and impressionistic, giving a vivid picture of domestic life at Aldworth under the wearisome restrictions of war. They also provide a touching celebration of maternal love, with lifelike portraits of Hugo and Sally (John and Jane), she cheerful and impulsive, he sensible and resourceful, barely managing to control a masculine exasperation with the silliness of the womenfolk."  From Rosamond Lehmann A Life by Selina Hastings

Books by Rosamond Lehmann (1904 to 1990)

"When the Waters Came"

"A Dream of Winter"

Wonderful Holidays  - A Novella

With the reading of these three World War Two era works, I think I have completed my read though of Rosamond Lehmann's fiction and her memoir and theories on spiritualism The Swan in the Evening Fragments of an Inner Life. 

• Dusty Answer (1927)
• Invitation to the Waltz (1932)
• The Weather in the Streets (1936)
• No More Music (1939)
• The Ballad and the Source (1944)
• The Gipsy's Baby & Other Stories (1946)
• The Echoing Grove (1953)
• The Swan in the Evening: Fragments of an Inner Life (1967) (non-fiction)
• A Sea-Grape Tree (1976)

Selina Hastings considers two  World War Two short stories and the Novella Wonderful Holidays to rank with the very best of the work of Lehmann.  

The first two works are not long, with estimated reading times of six and twelve minutes focus on families life, dealing with war time austerity and rationing and the war about loved one's in the military services.  The risk of air raids or rocket attacks from the Germans was less in rural England as the distance from London increased but was a possibility.  

Wonderful Holidays, Lehmann says of it "The third and longest, ‘Wonderful Holidays’, a superb piece of work, closely founded in fact, was serialised in four issues of New Writing during 1944–5, and describes the somewhat hectic staging of a revue to be performed in support of relief packages for soldiers and sailors, is really an enchanting work and a could way to finish up a first read through of Lehmann.  It shows how rural children from comfortable families dealt with the war.  

I will soon to a post on my observations on completing a read through of Lehmann's oevere and an account of why I undertook this effort.  

Mel u

The Blessing by Nancy Mitford 1951

Zoe Heller Refutes the Notion that Nancy Mitford's Novels are just Frivolous  "Chic Lit"

The Novels of Nancy Mitford 

• Highland  1931.
• Christmas Pudding. 1932. 
• Wigs on the Green. 1935. 
• Pigeon Pie. 1940. 
• The Pursuit of Love.  1945. 
• Love in a Cold 1949. 
• The Blessing. 1951. 
• Don't Tell Alfred. 1960.

The Blessing was proceeded by Nancy Mitford's two best novels, The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate.  Like her six other novels, it suffers by comparison but still has enough wonderful moments to make it worth reading.  The central character is an English woman totally in love with a French aristocrat.  Sound familiar? It is just before World War Two starts, they are in Paris and they marry.  They spend a few days together and the woman becomes pregnant with his son.  He is "the blessing". Then he is called into the war effort and is gone seven years.  We go through the years of separation.  She goes back to London with their son.  Then upon being united the patents decide to seperate.  The son realizes he can exploit this  to get more gifts etc. so he works to keep them from reconciling.

The fun in the novel is in the descriptions of life in Paris, of the love  interest and of Mitford's treatment of the son.  There are great lines and keen satire to be found.  There are interesting comparisons of London and Paris.  Paris always come out the winner.

This is book for those interesting in reading more than just Mitford's two classics.

Mel u