Retro Review: The Vegetarian
/When I started this blog, I had been posting reviews on Goodreads for about 6 months. In the interest of having all of my book writing in one place, I will post one of these old reviews every Friday. They weren't written with a blog in mind, so please forgive the lack of summary and off-the-cuff tone.
4 stars. Quick summary: a young woman, after having a traumatic dream, decides to become a vegetarian. In Asia, this is unheard of and provokes frustrated reactions from her family. This short book takes us into the heads of three people close to her: her strict husband, her sensitive brother-in-law, and her deeply unhappy sister as they try to change, understand, and accept her choice.
Every now and then I get an urge to read something truly unsettling. It's not that I enjoy (in the traditional sense of the word) being scared or disgusted, but sometimes I go after the books that are deliberately disturbing. It's just an urge, I don't know. It's like I want to explore how deep and dark the human imagination can take me. I want to find books out there that truly "go there." This is the one of the reasons why I loved The Vegetarian - it really, really goes there.
It's certainly nothing at all like what I expected. It wasn't disturbing in a way that I anticipated, either. Yes, there's gore, there are elements of horror, there's a sorta-kinda traditional "descent into madness," but primarily I was disturbed because it made me question ... a lot. It gave me anxiety of the most suffocating kind.
What if what we consider to be normal behavior isn't normal at all? What if we go through life thinking we know what's best for others? What if - good intentions aside - we end up condemning people to suffer in order to meet society standards/expectations?
This book made me question everything, particularly as a woman. I'm extremely fortunate to live in a "free" society that grants me privilege, opportunity, and choice. But I felt like a child after finishing -looking around, going about my day with a bell tolling "why? why? why?" in my head. Why am I doing this? Why did I eat this, why did I say that? Why am I polite? Why did I braid my hair? Am I conditioned? Am I even a good person?
Obviously there's a lot to unpack here and I have no idea if in reading this I drew the conclusions I was meant to. But that isn't a bad thing. This book will stay with me for a long time.