'The Vegetarian' by Han Kang: EW review

A young Korean woman’s carefully ordered world is cracked open by a single small act of rebellion in Kang’s slim, astonishing novel. Yeong-hye is a dutiful wife and obedient daughter, unremarkable until the day she wakes up and abruptly decides to stop eating meat. As her old habits begin to fall away, so does her compliance with a culture that finds her choice incomprehensible. But The Vegetarian isn’t an anti-meat manifesto or an uplifting story of emancipation. Instead, in dreamlike passages punctuated by bursts of startling physical and sexual violence, 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. A