65th Meeting (Book Club) - The Vegetarian (1/3)

Place: Marie Raey Teaching Centre, ANU

Participants: Matthew, Vienna, Paige, Sneha, Ben & 100.

We started our reading of 'The Vegetarian' - the first part of Han Kang's book 'The Vegetarian'. First each of us selected a sentence of a paragraph that we found interesting and proceeded our discussion focusing on those parts. We also read aloud some of the highlihgts (for example, the description of Younghye's dreams), too.

Here I share some of the topics that we discussed.

- The husband's description of Younghye's personality and the exploitive nature of their marriage relationship

- Younghye's first and second dreams and the vivid images of the ensanguined scenes in the dreams

- Younghye's unignorable existence in the company dinner

- Younghye's traumatic childhood memory of the brutal slaughter of the dog that her family had

- Forced feeding of meat to Younghye by her father, and the violent nature of the patriarchal family hierarchy in Korea

- The killing of a bird (by Younghye) and what it could mean

The book provides many interesting points for our discussion and we look forward to reading the second part in January! - 100

<Matthew, Sneha, and Paige having a chat before the beginning of the meeting.>