The Vegetarian by Han Kang

21:32This is super, it's dense, it's short, and it's intense. And you have here that it's really a horror novel. I'm not sure that I say it's really a horror novel for myself, but what would you like to say about that really and the horror of it all?

21:47Jeff:It's not pitched that way. But a lot of the things that happen are horrifying. This woman is in increasingly dangerous situations, increasingly violent situations. There are some novel equivalents of like, don't run up the stairs, get out of the house. What are you doing? Right. Yeah. And the way that it unfolds is psychological horror, you know, not like your slasher kind of thing. I think it's really powerful because on a certain level, we all can understand the desire to resign from humanity. And that over the course of the years that the book unfolds, Young-hae, she stopped eating meat, and then she's basically stopped eating everything.

22:33Jeff:And she has been institutionalized multiple times. At the end of the book, her sister is visiting her in a mental health ward, and she's being told they're trying to give her a feeding tube because she's near to death. She believes that she's a plant. So there is mental illness happening. And Kong has said in an interview that this character is suffering from a mental illness. It's not just like some existential thing that's going on. But it's relatable on some level to most of us, the desire to like absent ourselves from the violence of everyday life and like withdraw into the forest. Like she thinks she's becoming a tree.

23:13Jeff:And there's something terrifying about being able to see that in yourself and see it be reflected back to you in an extreme way in the book. But I do think also that as Western readers, we need to recognize that it's hard for us to fully connect to and comprehend. There's historical trauma that Kong is writing out of. And as with the Guangzhou massacre that we were talking about, we just don't have that in our cultural memories to know what it is that she's writing out of and writing through. But you can feel that this is a story about a traumatized person who is trying to take back some control over her body and her life.

23:54Yeah, and you're right. And specifically, most of us don't have access to the violences and the cycles of South Korean history. But what's interesting about this book is we don't get a lot of specificity about what it is. We get these images of the dream, but they're violent and there's like meat on sticks and blood and it's coming from her stomach. so it doesn't neatly map onto anything that I could really tell. It's just like there's something there. And I think that's another reason that it can work internationally and globally because most, if not all, cultures could point to something that's like, yeah, there's this crappy, there's this horrible thing that's lurking over it.

24:35And in this case, it might be as, it may not be this thing that was 100 years ago or 50 years ago or as a child. It could be childhood abuse. Her father was beating her over the calves at least. That's where we get secondhand. That's what someone else knows about. And one thing we know about abuse is sometimes the things that are told are not the worst of the things that actually are experienced. It could be a memory. It could be historical. It could be ghosts. If you've read We Do Not Part, there's like a ghostly memory element to it here. But to some degrees, the specifics don't matter because you're like, yeah, there's enough here to give anyone a nightmare, to shock anyone out of everything is fine.

25:19If you just look and feel hard enough.

25:21Jeff:Yeah, to be like desperate for a way to make the nightmare stop, because that's really where the not eating meat comes from, is that she thinks if she stops eating meat, the nightmares will stop. And she's being driven mad by it. And I think if you've had insomnia ever, you can know what it It would be like to approach that point where you would do anything to be able to just go back to sleep and stop having that nightmare or reliving that trauma or whatever it was. And I think it's important that it's the decision. I'm using decision very lightly because when we talk about mental illness, it's not that simple.

25:55And I hear Kong saying that she says it's mental illness. I think there's a way of reading that's both that and yes, and that there's something else going on. but the meat especially like at one point when she really doesn't want to touch her husband like you smell like meat i think there is a very clear transference of humanness onto that meat the dream meat is human meat that bad crap has happened to and i don't i'm not trying to fix it i'm not a crusader i just want away i just need i just need to get away from that is what's happening to the point where and then it becomes sort of disgusting to her i think to like put any kind of meat into her body at the same time, because it brings back these memories.

26:35There are three parts to this, and I think as much as anything, her action sets off reactions by other people, which initiates the plot of the book, such as there's the first thing that happens is her husband is reacting to this decision. One day, she stops eating, he sees her in front of the refrigerator, and her passivity terrifies him because he realized something has changed. and I have done this in straight thoughts. I'll bring it up here. Maybe the worst person in the world, her husband, you know, that doesn't actually committed war crimes. The dude really sucks, Rebecca. The guy sucks.

27:08Jeff:Men not looking great in this book. Very tough. In general. Yeah. Don't, don't do this. There's also the brother-in-law. Oh, go ahead. We can get to that. So he doesn't try to help her really brings the family to the bear, which also makes it worse. Her father tries to shove like mushed up meat down her throat in public. It's a horrible scene, especially a lot of stuff that happens later in the psych ward. There's various words she goes into. This one, I think, is maybe the worst because it is family, because it is. It's so he's not really trying to help necessarily. He's trying to control right at that particular moment.

27:47Jeff:Yeah, he's trying to make himself feel better by getting her to do what he wants her to do. And it's a really brutal violation in that scene. I do think there's a lot that's difficult to read in that book, but the scene of her husband dragging her to dinner at her family's house and being like, you fix her. And then her family's solution for trying to fix her is violent and abusive in several ways is the most difficult thing to see. And then it helps us also understand the kinds of relationships and the family environment that she's been in. Right. Would you like to narrate the middle section?

28:22I think it's too easy to talk about, so I better not.

28:25Jeff:Okay, so her brother-in-law, her sister's husband, another one of the shitty dudes of this story, he's an artist. We are given to understand he's not very successful. Yanghei's sister makes the money in the household. She runs a shop and the family thinks of her husband as like just kind of riding her coattails. No one knows if he's any good. But he's got this studio. He's like a video visual performance artist. And he's obsessed with a birthmark on Yang He's body that's called a Mongolian mark. If you Google it, you can see these are like birthmarks that look kind of bluish and typically they fade.

29:04Jeff:But Yang He's has never faded. He has this dream vision fantasy of painting flowers all over her body and incorporating the Mongolian mark into it. And then of seeing her body have sex with a man's body who is also painted that way. And he tries to recruit someone else to do this with her. It doesn't go well, but he's attracted to her and she's frankly an easy target. So he paints his own body, rapes her, and films himself, like films the act. She, consent is complicated because she agrees to this, but we understand that she is not in a healthy headspace to agree to it. And her sister later finds out about it and also perceives this to be a violation.

29:56Jeff:But he makes this art out of their bodies. That's really driven by his obsession and again, his desire to control her. How'd I do there? I think no notes. And then the final piece is told from her sister's point of view several years after this event in which her husband, the videographer, is now out of the picture. Her sister is in a psych ward and she's on her last malnutrition. They're trying to force feed her. It's a really horrible situation. But then what we really get in that is her own reflection on her life. Like we find out that kind of at the moment of this incident, this assault, this performance art, she was kind of at her own wits end.

30:46She was about to nope out herself. She was going to leave her kid and sort of take off or go to the forest. It didn't feel like suicidal ideation to me, Rebecca. I don't know if you had a different read, but she was just going to go. She was unhappy to a point of desperation in her own life. If she's running a successful department store, we don't know that much else about her except their own husband also talked to each other people. Another lesson from literature is talk to each other. Not a lot of talking to each other at this point. But then she kind of comes back around to finding some sort of communication, trying to see, trying to understand her sister and forgive her or at least come to terms that something else is going on besides my husband and you just had sex.

31:28Like something else was actually happening at that.

31:30Jeff:That there is something deep and really scary here. It's so important that this story is told through other voices and that Yang-hei never gets to speak for herself directly to us. We get her words to the other characters and their perception of them, but she doesn't get to tell us about waking up from the nightmare, if it felt like a decision or a compulsion or something else to quit eating meat. Like, it's so critical, I think, for the structure of this book to focus on that, that this is other people's responses to it, how they see her and how they're trying to use their interactions with her to address some things in their own desires, their own feelings that they don't control things elsewhere.

32:13Jeff:it's really quiet and surreal and dreamlike as all that's happening and i think that makes the horrifying elements land even harder that you feel this sort of like fuzzy edge around the frame but terrible things happening on screen yeah that her refusal i mean we're going to talk about connections to bartleby here down a little bit but i think there's a couple fascinating elements here where her husband has described his attraction to her in court for such as it was as she really didn't require anything like ultimately passive and this journey she goes on is a reducto ad absurdum version of that like i just i really don't need i won't even take in anything i will cause so little trouble that i won't even need food i won't need nurturing or care of any kind And of course, the problem is she is not a plant, even if she wants to become a plant.

33:11She cannot live on sunlight and water. So towards the end, when that's really all she wants to do, her physical body is broken down. Because this is not a transformation story. It's not a specific story where she becomes like an aspen or something like that. This is not Greek myth where something like that can happen. It is a fantasy of a kind, a dark fantasy where if I were just a plant, then I wouldn't be subject to memory. I wouldn't be subject to other people's bodies. I wouldn't be subject to the consequence and realities of being a human in the world. So it is an escape, but it's a refusal, but it's ultimately an impossible one.

33:46And there is no right answer here. I think one of the things that there is no, I don't know, this is a question for you, Rebecca. Is there something someone could have done? for this character, right? Because at one point, the brother-in-law does ask a question. He does a lot of bad things, but he also talks to her in a way that other people don't and says, I don't know if it's hard to talk about, but what's going on with you, essentially? And she's like, actually, it's not hard to talk about at all. I just don't want to eat meat. And he respects that and does some other things, but no one else is talking to her.

34:18They're only seeing her through the prism of their own understanding and their wants and desires. But I don't think we have, this is not a morality play in a simple way where this person should have done X. And she'd be like, you know what? I'm good. I will just have tofu and jackfruit and I'm going to be cool. This is not that story, right?

34:34Jeff:It's not. I think it would require a time machine way back to the earliest parts of this character's life for us not to arrive at some kind of disturbing moment with her. But the microcosm that Kong is using this to create is really about what happens when a woman does something unconventional. and it freaks everybody else out. First, it's the vegetarianism, but also we find out that she refuses to wear a bra. She hates it. And this drives her husband nuts. He thinks it's just inappropriate. She goes to a dinner with him and his colleagues, and it's obvious that she's not wearing a bra, and he's obsessed with watching his boss's wife notice, or he thinks that she's noticing, and everyone's judging.

35:18Jeff:Just how disturbed other people can be when somebody steps out of line of what's expected at all. So in some ways, like you need a whole different cultural system or a whole different family system for this character to exist in, in order to not have ended up in this place. Yeah. From a Vogue interview, they asked her, why do you think the vegetarian resonated with readers so strongly? Her response, the book layers rejections of violence, despair over being human and women's silent screams. And that's also a reflection of us living in the world. And so I think that's also one of the reasons that this got traction is because the reading experience is visceral.

35:58Like it's a real different kind of reading experience. You can't see my hand sort of curling up and doing kind of a fetal position thing with it. But then this two sentence she said, I think people got it. That was legible to readers on the tin. But also, it's also not a morality story where it's like a fortune cookie, little like, oh, with the answers and a neat kind of wrapped up with a bow. You had to live with the ambiguity and the difficulty of what those two sentences mean in this reading experience actually means. So Bartleby is much more of an enigma than this. This we kind of understand.

36:32Now, what to do about it is a completely different question. Because Bartleby is an enigma, there is nothing to do about it. It's almost like a force of nature or a legend or a myth. But this is much more indicting of a culture to exist in this particular way. I think it's also notable to see how her life activates other people in various ways. You know, I've always liked this idea that intense experiences make you more yourself rather than alter you. So what it does to her sister, to her brother-in-law, to her husband, to her father, to the institutions in which she is entrusted become grotesques.

37:07They become gargoyles of themselves. They're not different, but they're much more a version of themselves. I have Odyssey on the brain, but Cersei doesn't turn the men into pigs. She brings out their inner pigness is an interesting way of looking about this. And I think one thing that Kang is doing with this character is like she is she is drawing forth the essential questions and tensions and flaws that characters around the central vegetarian are experiencing to show us them in greater relief. Yeah.

37:39Jeff:And in the case for Yang He, everyone around her, their essential nature that comes out is something violent trying to control her. And with both of the men in the story, it's violent sex. The only sex that's on the page here is violent. And that sex and violence are inextricable is part of what Kang is writing about. This is unfortunately a very true thing for women's experience in the world. It should not be that way. But many, many women have violent experiences of sex. And that rape is about control and is about power. And like, it is not an accident that what happens here is she makes a decision or behaves, let's hold decision lightly.

38:20Jeff:She behaves in ways that are antagonizing to people and make them feel that they can't control her and they're not getting what they want from her. And the way that they try to take their power back is using sex in a violent manner. I do. I keep coming back to this question about is there a version of this where let's say she that day she has the dream and she decides to be a vegetarian and everything. Everyone's like, OK, we'll work with that. Is that where this process ends? or do the people's reaction to her exacerbate and then further her down this path? If she had been sort of accommodated in that initial change, would it have forestalled subsequent changes?

39:05Or does this become a second cycle of trauma, which is sort of then leads her down a path to a third cycle of trauma all the way down? And where at each port of being inhuman, she doesn't find respite. So she keeps going, right? Whereas if she could have had some respite initially, I don't know the answer to that, but I find it an interesting question to think about.

39:23Jeff:I think it kind of goes back to the time machine thing that what this character really needs is a life where she doesn't have to buck conventionality in this way in order to feel like she has some kind of control or that she can escape the nightmares that she's experiencing. Stuff is already going wrong for her by the time she has this nightmare and she says that she's not going to eat meat anymore because she's married to the kind of man who is like, I know that you're not in the mood, but just deal with it for a few minutes. Yeah, horrible. terrible and the only the reason i think um not that i'm not making a claim that there was but the the thing that got me thinking about it was there was a moment when she had been painted as flowers by the brother-in-law and had done the initial video shoot where she says the dreams had stopped right and if we had ended there or if her brother-in-law wasn't who he was and did what he did and she could sort of cosplay as a flower and was allowed to be weird and to live in her strangeness in the world.

40:31I mean, I'm always fascinated by the idea. It's a really good question. I'm thinking about like Geek Love or Catherine Dunn or like people who are affirming strangeness. Like let's find, I live in Portland, Oregon, which historically has its own problems with all kinds of racial pasts, but there's a version of it where people come here to find a space to be their little freaks, which I've always really appreciated, right? And couldn't we just be our little freaks? Couldn't we be cool with being a little freak is a question I'm interested in.

40:59Jeff:Yeah. What if we give Yang-hei a nice window where she can get good sunlight? We make sure that there's electrolytes in her water. Somebody finds a way to get her some protein through a fertilizer. Maybe she'll just eat enough beans. I don't know. Could we do this? I don't know. I'm interested in that. Yeah. I don't know. Maybe there would be some more accepting way to work with what she believes her reality is. The decisions that all the people around her make are not in her best interest. And the experiences that she has in the psych ward really raised the question of like, you know, do we know what to do with people who have unconventional ideas?

41:43Jeff:And where is the line between being strange and being mentally ill? Yeah, right. So I think that the question is never entertained still suggests a take on whether it was the impossibility of it within the text is important, right? That no one ever considered like, all right, well, she wants to wear flower paint and eat hummingbird water. Maybe we can give her some supplements and figure this out. I don't know. But it's never entertained as a possibility. That moves us into stray thoughts, things we noticed here. One of mine was how quick the menstrual institution came out in multiple cases. And that goes along with me.

42:23And I don't know all that much about South Korean culture at all. But certainly at this particular moment, that's a pretty strong response to vegetarianism initially, Rebecca? Did you? I mean, maybe this is the Portland and 90s of it at all with me. I was like, wow, I didn't really. This is this is rough stuff here. People are so worked up about vegetarianism.

42:44Jeff:It's not just the vegetarianism. It's what the vegetarianism means. They're like freaked out, though. But the other people are legitimately freaked out by it. Yeah. Yeah. And that's that was also a cultural thing that I wondered when they go to the company dinner and everyone's like, I could never be a vegetarian. what an odd choice. You're such a weirdo. And I don't know how that translates or how much of that is just effect that Kong is creating for us. Or satire, more directly satire. A South Korean reader would have known it wouldn't be that big of a deal, but it's representative of something else, as you say, which I think it is, but there's a part of it that I'm like, I wonder what that is Yeah, that's one of those things that's hard to grok.

43:24Jeff:The straight thought that I had, the first one here is Kong is like right up there in the like Mount Rushmore of artists who are really preoccupied with never sleeping. It's like her and Adam Duritz. They're like every Counting Crows song is about somebody not getting enough sleep. I have not yet read a Hong Kong book where someone gets a good night's sleep. There's always insomnia, weird dreams, something's going on. Like, is Hong Kong sleeping? Okay. I'm worried. Let me tell you from Light and Thread, she is not. I have never read an author more in need of an ambient in my entire life. I don't know.

43:58I don't want to medicate people because clearly one of the messages of this book is that always goes well, Rebecca. I've really learned my lesson. But I hope she's gotten whatever help she's tried and people have been gentle with her and let her be her weird self. But boy, it does not seem like it's easy to be Hong Kong.

44:13Jeff:And the books do have that feeling of like, I've had some, you know, like three or four night stretches of pretty bad insomnia at different points. And you do start to feel like you exist in a different plane of the universe or like a different string of the multiverse or whatever. Like you are not. You are unmade. I am unmade after a couple nights. I mean, when my kids were real new and we were doing the, and again, not as bad for me as for my partner, but still that's a cruel over time and you are a different person and it is tough. Yeah, it's really rough out there. One thing that I did go look, I'm always curious about how reviewers and readers receive something, but especially a book that is this complicated and can be difficult to read.

45:01Jeff:And the online reader reviews actually renewed my faith in humanity a little bit. What? The odds makers think of eating. I know. This never happens. But a lot of people were really surprised by what they found, which I expected, but largely in a good way, which was delightful. Even like Goodreads is people getting what she's doing. And I think that this points back to this is a writer who deserves something like a Nobel Prize, that they are taking on really difficult subject matter. They're not dumbing it down, but they're not also making it so difficult to access that you have to be, you know, like a super reader who can go through all the high art hoops.

45:42Jeff:It's legible to almost anyone who wants to engage with it. And that was it did my little heart good. I don't know if it grew three sizes, but it grew a little bit. I mean, if you go on the Internet and it doesn't shrink, you got to take the W when you can get it, Rebecca. Don't interrogate it too much. Yeah. Just a couple other straight thoughts. This is not what the girlies mean when we talk about wanting to become one with the forest. As a person who regularly... Did you feel indicted as a moss girl by this? It's like, okay, let's see what you're really going to do. Right. I regularly receive memes that are like, don't you just want to lay down and become one with the moss?

46:17Jeff:I'm like, I do, but not like this. This is not becoming one with nature that we have in mind, but she takes it to its nightmarish ends. today's episode is brought to you by usg audio same boat productions and peacock now if you're into a bookish kind of boozy kind of delicious good time it's perfect for book clubs i got something for you join best-selling author ellen hildebrand as she unpacks every moment of the five-star weekend with the show's cast and crew they discuss all the joy the drama the tea and of course the food. Now guests include Jennifer Garner, Chloe Sevigny, Regina Hall, Gemma Chan, Darcy Carden, Harlow Jane, Westa Covene, all the people friend and the series showrunner and directors.

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48:11Jeff:I'm not giving up. I am selling the building. The final season of FX is the bear. The restaurant is flooded. Everything's either going to be okay. No. Or not. We are outgunned and we are outmanned. We have each other. FX's The Bear, the final season. All episodes now streaming on Disney+. At one point, I think in the last section, in the last ward, where she's just standing on her head. And you have to knock her over for her to snap into consciousness. It's weird. It's a very strange... Yeah, standing on her head with her legs splayed. Yeah, to try to get the sunlight in. Is that where the sunlight goes?

49:00Anyway, we're not going to ask any of those questions right now. A couple more for you, then I'll get to mine on straight thoughts.

49:05Jeff:I don't know if this is Kong or the translator, Deborah Smith, but the word superfluity or superfluity, it's hard to say. It appears three or four times in a relatively short book, and it's an unusual word. So I just noticed. And it's interesting that a writer whose work is so spare and the worlds that she creates are so spare and controlled and there's real economy of language has characters and a narrator commenting on things that are superfluous or the absence. Like everything superfluous has been removed from these people's worlds. It's really interesting to see that repeat. It is so notable as readers, and I don't know that we all clock the same words, but if there's sort of a frequency continuum of words that you encounter in a book, if something is like a few standard deviations away from the mean, you notice it if it's mused more than once or twice.

49:59Sometimes twice is enough. I just read a book, I won't name it now because it's not about that, that used the word aperture three times in like 170 pages in different contexts. I was like, I noticed that. Anyway, that's something to say. I'll move on to mine. And I was fairly surprised in the initial reading. The language itself is pretty straightforward. Like on a sentence by sentence level, you can figure out what's going on, which then makes the mystery, I think, even greater. It's like, okay, I know all the words. I see what's happening. It's not a question of legibility. It's a question of what the hell am I looking at?

50:27And Kong relates to what you're looking at. I guess this is maybe a hot take more than anything, but plants are not as warm and fuzzy as people make out. I was doing some gardening. I do it a few times a year. Like I said, important, it's an aggressively verdant place. It really is. Plants are trying to choke each other out, people. It just is happening. So I just want to put that out there. Moss girl, just so you know, you would not be left alone. Deer would be eating you. You'd be bugs up on your business. That is not utopia. We got to figure things out here. That's all I'm saying.

50:58Jeff:And death is a part of plant life. My plant-loving friends are always lamenting the death of some beloved monstera. You're right. Being force-fed is way up there on the list of things I would not like to experience. Torture. Yeah. Yeah. Absolute torture. Does the brother-in-law's art suck or what? Even in the initial moments of before we knew where this was going, I was like, this sounds terrible. This is bad art. You're going to paint people like flowers? It's like first year in college. Everyone's like, oh, I can't believe you paint nude people like flowers. The 60s happened. Berkeley, someone did this.

51:36Jeff:Yeah, I respect a novelist who will try to describe art at all. I think that's really hard. And that she imagined this for this character and gives us detailed, like you can picture what it looks like. I think the descriptions are rich. But yeah, I love weirdo modern art. I don't want to see this. No. I was thinking of Yonghae as a sort of messianic figure. This is not written in a Christian tradition at all. But like, you think of what happens to messiahs and saints is that they take on a cause or they represent some idea of devotion or historical trauma. The messiah of all messiahs. Jesus, of course, is like, his body is on the line and it's representative of the sins of the world, right?

52:21That's what we're told is, for God so loved the world, he gave his only begotten son. This is not operating that, but her body and her consciousness is being kind of sin eater and what it does to her. And then is she sacrificed? And especially for her own sister's consciousness, it does something for her. So I thought that was that's something that I was thinking out throughout. Her husband is like the worst ever. I mentioned this already. Company dinners remain undefeated as bad hang scenes. I can't think of a scene in anything I've ever read or watched where people went to the company. Like, you know, that was great.

52:58We really connected as humans and affirmed our unique and special individuality. Just never happens. Yeah.

53:03Jeff:Or you got the Mad Men office party where they're driving the lawnmower through. Cut off somebody's foot. Yeah. Yeah. Nobody wants to go to the company dinner. Don't drag. This is hot take. Is this really a book about why you should not drag your spouse to your work events? I mean, it doesn't help. You may be surprised. We do not have a lot of company dinners as historically constructed. A virtual company helps with that. A virtual company, yeah. And then is this a book about the limits of medicine and therapy, right? If it isn't a mental illness, conventionally, there's nothing it can do. But if Kong says and One says it is, then maybe there's solutions.

53:41But Junghee says at one point, no one can understand me. The doctors, the nurses, they're all the same. They don't even try to understand. They just force me to take medication and stab with a needle. So I think as a reader, I take her as a corner case, right? She is not, she maybe have an idiopathic, I believe is the word, presentation of something, but the system cannot deal with it. And so in trying to use their standardized functions, they exacerbate rather than ameliorate and taking her for her own specific humanness or non-humanness, no one's ever like, you know what, we got to try something different.

54:19They just keep trying the same stuff and it makes it worse and worse and worse.

54:22Jeff:Yeah, the treatments that they're imposing on her are also violations of her body. They also feel violent to her. And so those are a product of and a part of the same system that put her in this place in the first place. So, of course, this kind of treatment can't fix her. Isn't going to work. Yeah. All right. Notable quotes, Rebecca. Goodreads. Are we coming back down from maybe Goodreads is good? We are. Or where are we? Okay. All right. We're coming back down. Goodreads really snags on eldest daughter syndrome as we know it on the internet. This is from In He's section, the last section of the book, after she has gone to visit Young He.

55:00Jeff:And she's realizing like kind of why seeing her sister in this state has stirred her up so much. So it says,

55:37Jeff:but a child who had never lived. Yeah, respectability pollux, but for ladies is sort of another way of phrasing that at the same time. I also had I Won't Eat It as her version of I Would Prefer Not To. Let's save our Bartleby for what other books it connects to. I think that's a really good one. Maybe I'll go for a couple and then you can tell me. This is the worst thing you can say, I think, about somebody maybe in a relationship. Before my wife turned vegetarian, I always thought her as completely unremarkable in every way. Tough stuff. Yeah. Yeah. He describes her as the most run-of-the-mill woman in the world as well.

56:17Yeah. And then in terms of her, this is also a thing messiahs do. They elicite responses in people. Some people are converted and some people then crucify. And this is the brother-in-law who's unnamed. I don't know if we said that, like importantly unnamed. And the people he works with only get an initial, like Kafka. I don't know what that was about. I did not like it that the person he drafted to be a part of it was Jay. I did not care for that particular. It's just, I'm putting that out there. And so this is his moment of self-inquiry. Was he a normal human being? More than that, a moral human being?

56:47A strong human being? Able to control his own impulses? In the end, he found himself unable to claim with any certainty that he knew the answers to these questions, though he'd been so sure before. before. So her transformation has destabilized him. It destabilizes everyone around them. And we're not given that that's the point of what she's trying to do. There is no point. There is no point. This is not a hunger strike kind of a situation, maybe except existentially. But we do see these transformations of people that do something other than just try to control her immediately in the form of her sister and brother-in-law.

57:25Neither of them look great in the long run, but they do have these moments of like, wait a minute, something else is going on here, even if they can't deal with it. I thought the Mongolian mark was fascinating, right? So this happens in certain ethnic groups, it's in every ethnic group, just more or less prevalent. And there's apparently in South Korean mythology or legend, it's a slap from one of the gods, like to get you out of the childbirth. So to get you going, like, let's move it. But it itself is a sign of a kind of trauma, right? And that hers doesn't go away. You know, we could do our metaphor section, but it's sort of just sitting there for it.

58:04Where else do you want to go, Rebecca, on quotes before I move on?

58:06Jeff:Just a couple examples of Kong's writing. The water's boiling. Her voice had no weight to it like feathers. It was neither gloomy nor absent-minded as might be expected of someone who was ill, but it wasn't bright or lighthearted either. It was the quiet tone of a person who didn't belong anywhere, someone who had passed into a border area between states of being. And then, a thrilling energy seemed to flow out quietly from some unknowable place inside his body and collect on the tip of his brush. He wanted only to draw it out for as long as possible. The light from the tungsten lamp only illuminated as far as her throat, leaving her face in the darkness.

58:44Jeff:She looked as if she were sleeping, but when the tip of his brush grazed her skin, her tremulous quivering told him that she was wide awake. Her calm acceptance of all these things made her seem to him something sacred. Whether human, animal, or plant, she could not be called a person. But then she wasn't exactly some feral creature either, more like a mysterious being with qualities of both. And he can't humanize her. These people in her life don't see her as fully human anymore. It's so critical to how they react and what happens to her and what she's reacting against, frankly. So this might be for you if you like language and you don't mind the, don't mind is not the way of putting it.

59:29You can deal with, you can hang with is your verb. Just use your verb, Rebecca. You wrote the right verb in there. We can hang with the disturbingness of this book.

59:36Jeff:Yeah. And maybe not for you if you are looking for a straightforward plot and all the trigger warnings, especially for sexual violence here. Yeah, if you're looking for a straightforward meaning or a page-turny plot, likable characters, resolution, none of that is at play. This is a different kind of book. I do think you were right earlier that this would be a fascinating book club book. The paperback that I have, thank goodness, does not have book club questions in it. Don't go looking for those. They wouldn't dare. But if you could drop into your book club and just have people wonder aloud together about how they experienced this book and what they related to, what kinds of things are antagonizing about it or not.

1:00:19Jeff:There's such a rich conversation to be had, I think. one of the fun uses of the immortal questions that art asks section we do is sometimes you read a book and we cover something like we just did something recently that was like kind of all of them and then you map something like this onto it and you're like huh i don't know exactly i'll run through so what if this is your first time listening these are just some of the big questions that art tends to ask over time and then we're sort of what applies to this one to a more or less degree. What is the good life? What do I owe my neighbor? Who is my neighbor?

1:00:55How do I know what I know? Is this all there is? How to deal with a certainty of death? What else might there be? What's the deal with good and evil? Free will, real or no? Who am I? Who are my people? And what is the nature of justice? I think this might be the hardest one yet, Rebecca. Where does your eye go to this? Does one of these seem something to hear?

1:01:20Jeff:I think it's fundamentally about what is the good life and that the answer, as close as we get to an answer on the page, is not this, not what Young-He has experienced, not the way that people react to her, kind of ties to what do I owe my neighbor or what do they owe her. And then there is a lot of death stuff, like that she maybe seems okay with dying or they wonder if she's trying to die. And at a certain point, she says, why is it such a bad thing to die that everyone else is wrestling with the certainty of death or the possibility that she might die? And could they, like, I think we wonder if they're wrestling with could they have prevented it or not?

1:02:08Jeff:Like, are they really trying? Do they care about her humanity? Do they care about her trying to extend her life? Or is it, is their reaction more about them? It's really on the page here. Free will, real or no? Yeah. I mean, this one doesn't seem that way. My sense of it is that she is not saying, you know what is going to fix me? Vegetarianism. So in that sense, there is a, she, we are subject to history and that subjectivity to history impedes upon our free will and all the biases and prejudices and injustices and equities, those are all impingements on free will. That's why we do not like them, because you do not think it can be fully human the more you are subject to them.

1:02:47I was also thinking about maybe in the, let's find a place where you can be your freaky plant girl. What else might there be? Are there other ways of being in the world that would feel more fulfilling or safe, protected or a thriving situation? Can we put her on the, can we fight the right windowsill for the plant of her life? We added recently, what is the nature of justice? I think implied with that, what are the consequences of injustice? And that seems to me something we could think about here. Okay. Are we sure this is about art and writing, Rebecca?

1:03:23Jeff:Well, a whole section of the book is about an artist. Yeah. I'm not sure it's about writing, but it is about representation, imagery, certainly what drives some kinds of artists and the uses and abuses of art. Yeah. Could you get most of the gist from watching the Signal adaptation? Were there one, if there is not one, I guess is implicit in that question. Yeah, I mean, there's a Korean film from 2009, 2010 that was decently reviewed, but it doesn't seem to be available anywhere in the U.S. So most of our listeners, that's not going to be an option. I think you really have to feel Kong through the writing.

1:04:11Jeff:But maybe that's just more about this writing is so good that I don't want to talk about an adaptation. What do you think? Yeah, I think you could. I think because the way that she is seen through other people's eyes lends itself to a camera. And it is an internal question, but it is so embodied. And you could see the manifestations over time. I think Kong is doing a lot of work to describe how someone seems. And an actor and a director could translate that into something before eyes in a way that would make sense. Because it's not largely about her interiority. in Twitter is not something that cameras do very well.

1:04:50We get their narration, so maybe voiceovers or something else. I think that part would be difficult because the internal dialogue of the husband, the brother-in-law, and her sister, their own processing or lack thereof is so important to the text. That would be difficult. But I think watching this woman try to turn herself into a non-human, i.e. plant, and the violence of some of these scenes, her own haunting visage would be pretty wild. I don't know if it would be a well-regarded movie, but I could see it being faithful at its core to it. So I don't know. Okay.

1:05:25Jeff:I think you sold me. I think I could imagine that. Yeah. I don't think we're going to do Muppets for this. I don't need that. I don't think this is a musical. I don't think it's a TV series. I think this is an 87-minute kind of character study, elliptical kind of situation. As tightly contained as the book is, it would have to be. Yeah. Right. Miscellaneous. Trivia adaptations, rumors, other stuff that don't neatly fit into one of other categories. Rebecca, what do you dig up? So this character, Young He, was inspired by a line from a poem by Yi Sang. He's a modernist poet from the early 20th century who was heavily censored under Japanese rule and whose work evokes the violence and agitation of imperialism.

1:06:06Jeff:And Yi described catatonic withdrawal as a symptom of oppression and said, quote, I believe that humans should be plants. And that is what inspired Kong to do this. That's a New Yorker piece from 2018 by Jiang Fan. Also, Deborah Smith's English translations of Kong's work have sparked controversy because some readers have alleged that Smith embellishes the work in order to make it more legible to Western readers. And Smith's response, I love this sentence, is, I would only permit myself an infidelity for the sake of greater fidelity. That same Jiang Fong piece from The New Yorker talks about how one of the reasons that many Western readers find so much contemporary Korean fiction to be unpalatable is the passivity of its narrators.

1:06:57Jeff:And so Smith emphasizes conflict and tension, which makes Kang's work more engaging for Western readers than a right-on faithful rendition would be. So like in the original, when Yang He ignores a question from her husband, he says that it is, quote, as if she hadn't heard me. And then in Smith's version, the husband asserts that she is, quote, perfectly oblivious to my repeated interrogation. So a little more, just a little more action, a little more for a Western reader to hold on to. you. Yeah, every time we bump up against translation, and it's in the water right now, because we're a couple, we're just a week outside of the Odyssey of premiering in theaters, and people are talking about translations in a way that they generally don't.

1:07:39It kind of makes me when I think about, I read about space time. It's like, I can't think about that. That's too big for my brain to handle. There's too many contradictions, but it's good to know it's out there. It's like, always remember, especially in translation, that you're dealing with some version of the thing, and it has trade-offs, I guess, is the most important thing. You're trading one thing off for another. And that's what all language is. I mean, even not in translations, I found this quote from an interview Khan gave about Greek lessons to be quite fascinating. She says, language is like an arrow that always misses its target by a narrow margin and is also something that delivers emotions and sensations that are capable of inflicting pain.

1:08:19I don't know what to do with that necessarily, but language is like an arrow that always misses its target. but it's the best arrow we have for telling stories like this. You know, there's no, and I think you could sub in translation similarly. Like translation is narrowly missing the target of bringing forth the original in some kind of way. So these are two arrows that have both narrowly missed their target, sort of stacked on top of each other.

1:08:43Jeff:Yeah, we talk about this with adaptation as well. Like what is an adaptation's job? Is it to be as faithful as possible to the words on the page Or is it to render the story on screen in a way that brings the story to life, that holds the main vibe, that is legible to viewers? And that translation exists in that same zone where translators are trying to do both of those things, but they are playing with the balance of like, you want to serve this writer's work and have it reach readers. how much adaptation of the language is acceptable, where's the line. And of course, there's not one right answer to that.

1:09:23Jeff:So it's really interesting to tangle with. Yeah. I'll leave one hot take, and it's only sort of a medium take. I'm glad to read a book about culture and food that is not just food is life and our people are our food. I mean, I'm from Kansas City. So like I know Kansas City's barbecue. And this is something that happens when we talk about food. But this is complication, our relationship with food, and how this can be, it is part of the structure of our lives and our cultures. And those structures are not always amazing, right? And so how does that happen? I like reading about food all the time.

1:09:56I like food, but I like to have something that's taking a different take on it. That makes me really think and engage with it in a different way. Further readings, Rex Farida likes books inspired by this one and more. We'll get to Bartleby in a second. I thought about the metamorphosis right away. Maybe you did too. I don't know if you had this by Kafka. Gregor Samsa wakes up as a cockroach. That is clearly speculative fiction, but something has happened and what it does to the people in his life is actually not... Being turned into a cockroach in itself is not the huge problem. Not amazing, but what everyone does around him.

1:10:28If he could left to be a cockroach, maybe Gregor Samsa turns out okay. Also, I didn't know if the singular... There's a couple of moments of using people's first initials. That's a very Kafka thing. I don't know if that's a nod or just something else going on at the same time. I was thinking about other elusive narrators. An Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison is an inversion of this where the person we start with is unnamed and he's living in this underground subterranean cave slash office and he's writing the story of what has happened to him. And at the end, we find out he's going to emerge from it to sort of come back into the world.

1:11:07But he's a weirdo. He's had all this strange traumatic experience. And he's kind of gone into a hibernation, right? He's lost his leaves. And he's getting ready to fruit again. But we see all the interior work that's going on. But from the outside, someone just coming across this thing, like, that person needs to be in a mental institution. So it's kind of from the other side. We get no interiority from our main character and the vegetarian. We get only the outward manifestation of that. whereas Invisible Man is the opposite. So I'm looking for these weirdos who are trying to take in the world and do something with it and process it in some way.

1:11:43Jeff:I love this frame. The Mosquito Coast by Paul Theroux. This is also people trying to get away from humanities and start over. It's like going into the jungle. The main character, it's a white family. The main character wants to take his family deep into the jungle and take them ice and sort of start anew that's unsullied and unspoiled. Let's just say they bring the demons with them, Rebecca. It doesn't go amazing. They do not build utopia. Your giant is with you always. The giant is with you always, as Emerson says. Then I had Light and Thread. Hong Kong is dealing with a lot of the same... She's interested in these issues, and she lives very intensely.

1:12:17I'm not saying she is this character. That's not what I'm saying. But she lives a fascinating, intense experience. I'm not sure it's easy to be her. Not that it's easy to be anyone. And then I was thinking about Edition by Katie Kimura. What's a more recent book that has an enigma at its core?

1:12:32Jeff:Great pull, yeah. it's so it is and I don't want to spoil that if you haven't read it it was my favorite book of the year last year we've talked about in the book where I podcast before I interviewed Katie Kammer for first edition I really like her work but this one is a central enigma that may or may not be about similar issues I haven't wrestled with it too much but like I don't I put I'll leave that to you you've read that I don't know if that makes sense yeah no I think audition is a great even just for the readerly experience and dropping into something that is unsettling and leaves a lot of work for you to do as a reader to imagine what's going on.

1:13:08Jeff:I so appreciate that you carried the water here on the read-alikes because I was like, just read more Hong Kong. Yeah, I was going for things that don't replicate the actual experience. Maybe you're trafficking in the same things in a different way. She's so singular to me that if you are interested in more of her work, We Do Not Part is another novel that is inspired by and informed by a major violent cultural moment, but is told through a close interpersonal relationship. There's a lot of dreamlike stuff and some actual dreams that happen on the page. And Greek lessons is this really intriguing premise where this young woman in Seoul is going to Greek class to learn.

1:13:49Jeff:She has lost her voice and he is losing his sight, the teacher is. And they have this fascinating connection. It's a really small, very short, packs a powerful punch kind of story. We've talked about Bartleby. We've named Bartleby a bunch. We could probably do a whole nother episode about why it is and isn't like that. But clearly this figure who presents a ontological problem to the people in their life because they do not literally, figuratively, philosophically know how to deal with it. Pretty fascinating. And also where Bartleby ends up, I think, is not dissimilar from where our main character here.

1:14:27Jeff:Yeah. Just how much unconventionality freaks other people out? It really does. Really does. Consistent. You put Gone Girl on here, which didn't come to mind to me immediately, because some of it is I can't remember what will have been out. But I think this is an excellent pull, Rebecca. You want to say more about Gone Girl? Yeah. As this episode is coming out, Gone Girl will be in the feed, has been in the feed pretty recently. And so my reading of them is close together. I don't know that I would have arrived at this if they weren't. But there is so much of just like these terrible marriages, people pushing back against social constraints and trying to have a little control for themselves and to express themselves.

1:15:06Jeff:And also the couple in Gone Girl and Yanghei and her husband have both, they talk on the page about having been married for five years and that like now they're hitting this crisis point. I was like, this is just a bunch of kind of funny coincidences. Is that like a reverse inflation? Because it used to be the seven-year itch, but now the modern world is so bad it's down to five. I guess. Yeah. Long enough for the shine to have worn off. Yeah, I guess so. And watching other people's reactions to a character who has dropped a bomb into their social group. Yeah, Amy is the inverse in this way, which is she is manipulating the reactions that will come.

1:15:47It's like the standard reactions will come. Whereas in this book, the standard reactions just come. They just happen on the page. What if Amy was the main character in The Vegetarian? That's a weird idea.

1:15:59Jeff:That's a psychotic book. Yeah, I just broke myself thinking about that. Our Cocktail Party Crib Sheets. If someone brings it up in conversation or asks you if you've ever read it, what are a few things you could say about it, Rebecca? Other people, even those closest to us, remain unknowable. And I like the parenthetical you added here for me of especially if you never ask. Especially if you never ask, what is going on? Yeah. Also, really, nothing scares people more than finding out a woman they thought they could control has a mind of her own, even if that mind is possibly ill. Yeah. Or especially if it is.

1:16:32This is a hunger strike against the human condition. That's what my short version of this is. All right. Our final segment, our zero to well-read score. Each of these gets a score from 1 to 10, with 10 to being the highest. This is not about you get the higher score, you're better. This is just sort of putting in context where the value, the vibes, and sort of where we're thinking about this. So historical importance, it's new, but Nobel Prize, first Asian woman to read, a younger writer. We're going to have a lot of time with Hong Kong over the next X number of years. We hope she lives a nice long life and for our benefit continues to write in what seems like an excruciatingly painful process.

1:17:13Just having read a little bit about it, Rebecca, what to do with historical importance for a book like this?

1:17:19Jeff:Six? Seven? Somewhere in there? I had seven. That's where my brain went to at the same time. Great. We'll go with seven. About as high for something 10 years old as you're going to get. Maybe that's another way of putting it. Readability, I think very high and borne out by its relative popularity. Yes, and the responses to it. sentence by sentence, paragraph picker, page by page, it moves. Whatever friction there is, is really content, idea, ramification. So not a 10 because that's page turner, you know, Da Vinci code. Like that's a 10. Yeah. I think an eight, seven or eight. Yeah. Somewhere in there.

1:18:00That makes sense to me. I would feel better about the current relevance and central questions if I was clear about what they are. I feel like this is like a, it's like a Schrodinger's cat question. Like I kind of see it, but I feel like I can't get my arms around it necessarily. On the other hand, there's a version of it that seems pretty straightforward. Rebecca, where do you come down on this?

1:18:20Jeff:Yeah, I think it's a 10. A 10? I do. Like that the central questions are, the ones that I can latch onto at least are about about how we exercise autonomy. And even if that autonomy is not coming from a fully healthy place, people still have autonomy. How we exercise autonomy, how other people respond to that, what the limits of our freedom are, including the freedom to do things that harm ourselves or that other people think will harm us, control the inextricability in many unfortunate ways of sex control and violence are questions that have existed for as long as humans have existed. So I think it's very high.

1:19:10I'm not going to get in your way.

1:19:11Jeff:Great. 10. Book nerd read cred. It was pretty popular, as we keep saying, relatively speaking. So I can't go 9 or 10. We're now out from it, but then Kang also won the Nobel. So 7 again? I think a 7 is fair. Yeah. Yeah, 7. Seven or eight. Oh, damn factor. Tricky. High.

1:19:38Jeff:Really depends on if you like to be unsettled or if you're good with being unsettled by what you read. I mean, whether or not you're good with it, it still unsettles you, right? It's sort of undeniable in that way. Eight and a half? Sure. How do you feel? How do you feel? I feel good about that. Eight and a half is good. You react well to an eight and a half? I do. Good. So happy. All right. We come to the end. If you want to hear us talk a little bit more in office hours, we're going to be looking at the current betting favorites for the 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature. I don't know that Kong was on that list at the time.

1:20:12This is not something I generally look at.

1:20:14Jeff:It's often a surprise. It's often a surprise, but that's at patreon.com slash as you're too well read. You can also get guided readalongs. Rebecca's cooking up our next one for the fall and other membership options. You can follow us on the socials everywhere, Basically, there's handles. We're at Zero to Well Read Podcast. I think Rebecca's cooking up something right now that will probably be out by the time this comes out. But who knows what wonders and treats will await you on those channels. Always shoot us an email. Zero to Well Read at Book Riot dot com. May not make it into a mailbag. I will read them all.

1:20:45I will eventually respond to them all. Sometimes I need to ponder for a little bit. We do. But we always like your feedback.

1:20:51Jeff:We do have an anniversary mailbag coming up in early September. So this is like prime time for you to send us. thoughts, questions. Doesn't have to be specifically about a book or necessarily about reading even, but like if we were hanging out having dinner or coffee together, what would you want to ask us? Right. And thanks as always to Thrift Books for sponsoring this season of Zero to Well Read. And Zero to Well Read is a proud member of the Airwave Podcast Network. Rebecca, thank you so much. Until next time.

1:21:26Thank you.