Take a leaf out of a book

I read Han Kang’s novel, The Vegetarian , at last. ‘Last’ almost literally — for I read it on the last day of last year. The book had been chasing me for months — ever since How I Became a Tree came out, people who’d read both the books, Kang’s novel and my book of non-fiction, would ask me, “Have you read The Vegetarian ?” Their question had a mysterious air of knowledge that had, at least temporarily, until I read the book, been denied to me. Never one to buy or read a book from its paraphrase available in reviews, I responded to it as I do to most books that are feted by awards and lists — rejecting it stubbornly. Smita Sahay, a poet and editor who understands this stubbornness, gave it to me as a gift; “I know you avoid reading books on bestselling lists, but I kept thinking of your book when I read The Vegetarian ...”

Written by South Korean writer Kang, The Vegetarian is, as the title suggests, a story about a woman rejecting non-vegetarian food, and her desire to turn into a tree. After I’d finished reading it by the early evening of December 31, I spent New Year’s Eve wondering about the reasons, possible and imagined, that might have driven the protagonist of Kang’s novel and me to want to become a tree. Firecrackers tore the silence of New Year’s Eve, and though the windows were closed, the cold air soaked its remains. I found it difficult to breathe. My mind returned to the subject from time to time. It was a rejection of everything around me, the fireworks and their inconsequential and unnecessary celebration of a passage of one calendar year to another, the noise of revelry so distant from the sound of joy and delight, an emotional economy that I felt unequipped to deal with.

The Vegetarian begins with the vegetarian’s husband telling us about the plainness and ordinariness of his wife, how there was nothing remarkable about her. Until we come to the third page of his narration and the paragraph begins:

‘The only respect in which my wife was at all unusual was that she didn’t like wearing a bra.’

In How I Became a Tree I’d set out to find people who had, like me, exhibited the urge to become a tree. Why had they sat under trees, gone into the forest, likened plants to children, and so on?

The first sentence of my book was —

‘At first it was the underwear. I wanted to become a tree because trees did not wear bras.’

That the discomfort of wearing bras could be a shared characteristic among women who wanted to become trees seemed to suggest something about women, their bodies, and how they experience pain. But there were differences. As the novel progresses, Yeong-hye begins rejecting meat, and then food altogether, relying on fasting to turn her into a tree. This felt unfamiliar to me, not just to my food-relishing self but also to what I’d read and examined about people like myself, who’d wanted to become trees.

The Vegetarian is a book difficult to classify, because it doesn’t have the openness one expects of a novel. As I read about the woman who wants to be a tree and watched her waste away and witnessed her relationships die and her flesh wither, I had the sense of reading something that was only disguised as a novel. The spine of The Vegetarian is not imagination but morality, an uncompromising utopia that, perhaps because of its presentation (could it be the loss or addition of something during the process of translation?) makes the desire to live like a tree a rejection of the humane. I often had the sense of reading a manifesto — not my favourite form of literature — that had energised and also, in turn, been energised by a corrupt world order that was drugged on morality in the Anglophone world. That morality seemed all the more resurgent because of the gap between what the residents of this morality-charged world did and how they actually lived their lives. It is possible that this world view, with its tone of outrage, had been imported from the Anglophone world into the Korean by the translator. Whether that is true I shall never know.

To want to become something or someone begins from desire, from love. My emotional problem with The Vegetarian was the self-enclosed ruthlessness of that desire. To want to become a tree is not to reject the body (trees have bodies, not minds) and sex, is not to become inert and forgetful of the world, as the vegetarian does, in trying to become a tree through art (and artifice), with her body painted to resemble a tree’s. What I missed in The Vegetarian , shrouded as it sometimes seemed in its high-strung dismissal of the human world, was love, and its breeze that touches our leaves. To feel that love and its leaves would perhaps make us a little like trees.

Sumana Roy

Sumana Roy , author of ‘How I Became a Tree’, writes from Siliguri; @SumanaSiliguri

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