[100 Challenge] Roberta Gattel_77

The vegetarian, Kang Han, 2007

I discovered by chance that Kang Han won the Nobel Prize for Literature this year.

When I bought "The Vegetarian," I had never heard of the author before and had never even read South Korean authors. I purchased the book to explore the Literature of other continents: it was the beginning of a very long journey of de-Eurocentrism that would lead me to meet many distant voices, which have now become those closest to me.

I remember reading the book initially with familiarity and then with a crescendo of anguish. I had just entered my 20s and had left behind, not without scars, years of severe eating disorders. Finding a character who begins a path of radical detachment from the world and from life, first mentally and then physically, gave me a contrasting feeling: part of me felt close to the protagonist, and the other part hated her.

It reflected my feelings toward myself in the recent past. But it also mirrored the contradictions that I continued to experience in the present: I still wanted to respond "physically" to my thoughts, to embody them, taking them to their extreme consequences, but I suffered from the inability to find a non-masochistic way to realize this drive. With all its urgency, materiality, and ordinary compromises, life seemed an unbearable hypocrisy.

I wanted to eat less not to impact the environment, but my body couldn't handle the restrictions imposed by my mind. I wanted to help people with difficulties, but dedication to others with self-sacrifice required part of my health in return. I wanted to be correct, but the ideals that guided me often led me to actions others did not understand. I wanted to be honest, but saying what I thought hurt the people around me. I wanted to be loved, but my behavior alienated the people around me.

I couldn't have everything I wanted: choosing to heal just one part of me meant losing the other.

For years, at the end of my adolescence, I dreamed of rejecting this choice, this compromise; I dreamed of living in contemplation, of letting myself go, of disappearing, reabsorbed by the "indifference of nature" as does Yeong-hye, the protagonist of the book, who starts by refusing to eat meat and ends up reclaiming her existence, slowly detaching herself from it.

“The feeling that she had never really lived in this world surprised her. It was a fact. She had never lived. Even as a child, as far back as she could remember, she had done nothing but endure. She believed in her inherent goodness and humanity and lived accordingly, never causing anyone harm. Her devotion to doing things the right way had been unflagging; all her successes had depended on it, and she would have gone on like that indefinitely. She didn't understand why, but faced with those decaying buildings and straggling grasses, she was nothing but a child who had never lived.”