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# Another tick in the list of Nobel laureates' books read
- URL: https://theparnassian.com/en/stavim-eshche-odnu-galochku-v-spiske-prochtennykh-knig-nobelevskikh-laureatov/
- Published: 2024-10-10T15:24:25.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-01T05:32:27.000Z
- Author: Alexandr Radayev
- Tags: The East, Books, Observations

Another tick in the list of Nobel laureates' books read. Russian-speaking readers could already make the acquaintance of the South Korean writer Han Kang a few years ago: two novels by this year's Nobel laureate have been published in Russia, "The Vegetarian" and "Human Acts".

In "The Vegetarian" we learn the story of a woman, Kim Yeong-hye, who, after a series of disturbing, frightening, bloody dreams, decides to give up meat and becomes a vegetarian. We learn of the heroine from the accounts of three members of her family: her husband, her brother-in-law and her sister. Her story is rather joyless, pallid and dreary. The novel is written with mastery. The backdrop is a picture of patriarchal South Korean society, in which irreversible changes are beginning to take place as women acquire independence, together with the conflicts attached to timid attempts to win equal rights.

The book is not an easy one. It is heavily coloured: on the one hand rather feminist in its edge, on the other charged with deep, transcendental anguish over the fate of a human being, and with the bitter ending evident almost from the very start. The heroine is weak, exhausted, depressive, and gradually simply goes out of her mind. We look at her tragedy through the eyes of three different people, who do not extend a helping hand but stand detached from the calamity unfolding before them: the husband in great resentment, the brother-in-law in great desire, the sister in incomprehension.

One detail stuck in my memory. In the part narrated by Yeong-hye's brother-in-law, her sister's husband, where he lusts after the unfortunate woman, I noticed the mention of a Mongolian spot on the heroine's body: a congenital feature of skin pigmentation in the area of the sacrum or buttocks, characteristic of many representatives of the Mongoloid race. This spot is sometimes called the mark of Genghis Khan and is linked to an indication of kinship with the Genghisid line.

By the plot, Yeong-hye is in the end to become a plant. The view from the window of the ambulance seems to point precisely to this denouement. Reviews mention a line from a poem by a Korean poet on the same theme: "I believe that people ought to be plants". But it seems to me that the words of Jung suit the novel better: "people grow like plants, some in the light, others in the shade, and many need precisely the shade, not the light"