FROM HAN KANG, WINNER OF THE 2024 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE “[Han Kang writes in] intense poetic prose that . . . exposes the fragility of human life.”—from the Nobel Prize citation WINNER OF THE INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE • “Kang viscerally explores the limits of what a human brain and body can endure, and the strange beauty that can be found in even the most extreme forms of renunciation.”—Entertainment Weekly One of the New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century “Ferocious.”—The New York Times Book Review (Ten Best Books of the Year) “Both terrifying and terrific.”—Lauren Groff “Provocative [and] shocking.”—The Washington Post Before the nightmares began, Yeong-hye and her husband lived an ordinary, controlled life. But the dreams—invasive images of blood and brutality—torture her, driving Yeong-hye to purge her mind and renounce eating meat altogether. It’s a small act of independence, but it interrupts her marriage and sets into motion an increasingly grotesque chain of events at home. As her husband, her brother-in-law and sister each fight to reassert their control, Yeong-hye obsessively defends the choice that’s become sacred to her. Soon their attempts turn desperate, subjecting first her mind, and then her body, to ever more intrusive and perverse violations, sending Yeong-hye spiraling into a dangerous, bizarre estrangement, not only from those closest to her, but also from herself. Celebrated by critics around the world, The Vegetarian is a darkly allegorical, Kafka-esque tale of power, obsession, and one woman’s struggle to break free from the violence both without and within her. A Best Book of the Year: BuzzFeed, Entertainment Weekly, Wall Street Journal, Time, Elle, The Economist, HuffPost, Slate, Bustle, The St. Louis Dispatch, Electric Literature, Publishers Weekly

This sub-read did not work for us. Kang's novel is basically a fable about a woman finding an independent idea and then being ostracized by her family because of it. That is an interesting plot to make into a metaphor, but the issue was that the choice the wife made that the family couldn't accept was that the wife became vegetarian. Now, perhaps this is a cultural thing, but is there any developed part of the world that hasn't heard that some people don't eat meat? Is it actually incredible to conceive of that? We know this was a parable, so the idea that the husband would blow this out of proportion and go to extreme measures was fine, but the seed of it was just so unbelievable that everyone got off the ride before any of the crazy stuff could start. NUBClub has had generally bad luck with modern fables, and this was no exception. The lesson here is that no matter how metaphorical you're going to be, you need to start with a seed we don't balk at, or else we lose suspension of disbelief in the first twenty pages and the rest of your novel is wasted.