When I started reading The Vegetarian, I was intrigued. An odd premise and catalyst for marital dissolution - the wife goes vegetarian one day because she had a dream. She descends into madness from there. Stranger things happen to people and to their marriages so why not this. By the time the action turned to the husband and his predilection for painting flowers on the body of his naked sister-in-law and then recording it, I was not sure I was following the plot anymore.
The book seems to be well-written even in translation, but something seems off. Its like we go on a hike, following a well marked trial and all looks great and suddenly we take a detour to be adventurous and simply can't find our way back to the main trial. Consequently, what started out being a nice hike ends up being a frustrated aborted mission.
Reading this review by a bi-lingual writer, offers some insight into the ailment of this book in its English translation. In describing the work of the translator Deborah Smith, he says:
Even if Smith had corrected all the obvious errors, it still wouldn’t have changed that she “poeticized” the novel. In terms of tone and voice, “The Vegetarian” is strikingly different from the original.
For one thing, Smith amplifies Han’s spare, quiet style and embellishes it with adverbs, superlatives and other emphatic word choices that are nowhere in the original. This doesn’t just happen once or twice, but on virtually every other page. Taken together, it’s clear that Smith took significant liberties with the text.
I find it hard to come up with an adequate analogy, but imagine the plain, contemporary style of Raymond Carver being garnished with the elaborate diction of Charles Dickens. Smith’s embellishments create more suspense and interest for the English reader, but for those who can read the original, it can be quite jarring.
Maybe that is it - by giving Carver a Dickens make-over, Smith has managed to confuse the heck out of the clueless reader who has no foundational understanding of the culture the characters come from. With that it becomes all but impossible to understand their actions and motivations as the story unfolds.
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