The Vegetarian by Han Kang

BATB Score: 8.5/10 🤯

BATB wanted to know what kind of masterpiece writing does it take to win 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature (also congratulations Han Kang well-deserved 👏 )

Best to: eloquence in narration - word choice, sentence structure, convey character emotions, graphic narration, oddest plot, open-ended confusing ending

Best as: imagine being award with the utmost prize of 2024 for something you wrote in 2007, which was only translated in 2015, to someone like me just reading it today - 18 years later 🫠

Best for: a novel as an art form; reading this novel counts as art appreciation

BATB lingering thought: it’s about vegetarianism, nightmares, mental health, anorexia, schizophrenia, affairs, and family relationships; part one was like Parasite the movie, part two was Murakami explicit sex scenes, part three was a day in a life in a psych ward

Best quotes: “Time was a wave, almost cruel in its relentlessness as it whisked her life downstream, a life she had to constantly strain to keep from breaking apart.”

“Why, is it such a bad thing to die?”

“The feeling that she had never really lived in this world caught her by surprise.”