Personal Is Political

Now at least I can look at you in peace. I don’t eat you anymore. (Kafka to Max Brod, his estate keeper, upon seeing a fish in an aquarium at the Berlin zoo.)

The aphorism ‘the personal is political’ may be what Han Kang’s The Vegetarian is all about. This is a story of personal revolt caused by a psychosomatic condition that may be symbolic of a political and social revolt—women making choices for themselves and their households independent of the men they marry and a rejection of family traditions and customs, mirroring dissent to the rigid politics in Korea. Han Kang has expressed her alarm at the authoritarian streak of the President, Park Geun-hye, the daughter of an assassinated military dictator.

First published in 2007 as three separate novellas and now translated by Deborah Smith, The Vegetarian is recounted by three different narrators. The book revolves around a seemingly simple decision of a married woman not to eat meat. Not only does this decision elevate her from the status of an ‘unremarkable’ and ‘ordinary’ woman in the eyes of her husband, it also changes the way her entire family consisting of her parents, brother, sister and brother-in-law see her.