The Vegetarian by Han Kang - May 23, 2025

The Vegetarian first edition English

Though the title of this Man Booker International Prize-winning novel is The Vegetarian, it is not about vegetarianism at all. Rather it is about mental health, child abuse, choice, and conformance to norms.

We follow a woman named Yeong-hye who decides to stop eating meat after having horrible dreams. This decision of hers, especially in a predominantly meat-eating culture like Korea, fragments the family with far reaching effect. The story is in three parts, each part from the perspective of three people in her life. The first part titled The Vegetarian is narrated in first person by her husband who is always referred to formally as Mr Cheong, in a way keeping him apart from the intimate family structure. The second part is from the perspective of her unnamed brother-in-law and is titled Mongolian Mark, and the third is in first-person narrative by Yeong-hye’s sister, In-hye.

Seoul panoramic view – a megacity of 10 million, pronounced 'soul’

Though it causes so much tumult in the family, no one tries to discover the reason for Yeong-hye’s decision to turn vegetarian.  Her family, especially her abusive father, tries to force her to eat meat with disastrous effect. She mentions many times that she has a dream, but we are left to discover the dream and the possible reason for the decision, in the few portions in the book where Yeong-hye is given a voice. 

The abuse she has suffered and the trauma that she has gone through comes out in bits and pieces. Her husband abandons her; her brother-in-law sexually abuses her when she is at her most vulnerable emotional point, and her parents refuse to have anything to do with her. At a time, when she needs the most support, she has only her sister In-hye who stands by her and attempts to make sense of her situation. As Yeong-hye descends further into her insanity, In-hye realises that it could have been herself in the same situation if the circumstances had been different.

The translation was very patchy with syntax errors and use of very British slang which jarred with the text. Translations of novels are always difficult to judge especially as we have no knowledge of the original text. Does the translator replace words in one language with those of another or does he/she smooth out the narrative with the usages of the translated language? Then what happens to the idioms and speech conventions of the original language? Whatever the case, the story should have a smooth flow, which was missing. It could have been subjected to a tighter editing, and that felt strange as the Man Booker International is for books in translation. One could not agree with the reviewer of the New Statesman whose commendation was: “elegantly translated into bone-spare English”

In the end, it is a disturbing book, which almost none of the KRG members liked, but it still led to very lively discussion and debate as we tried to make sense of it. 

Antony and Cleopatra by William Shakespeare, April 24, 2025

 

The Tragedie of Anthonie, and Cleopatra – from the first folio edition, 1623

This Roman play of Shakespeare has many similarities with Romeo and Juliet, which was also a tragedy about Italian lovers who end up committing suicide. But this play in contrast is about mature love among adults who have already been ‘ploughed’ and ‘cropped,’ had wives and lovers, and seen action at the head of their empires. The military history of the times is combined with the mutual attraction between Antony and Cleopatra which pervades the play.

Cleopatra Sculpture by William Wetmore Story, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

As usual Shakespeare borrows the story from a source, in this case, Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans. Plutarch was a Greek biographer and historian who lived from AD 40 to about AD 120. Shakespeare mined the book (in a 1579 English translation by Thomas North) for his Roman plays, Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, and Coriolanus. How reliable Plutarch was as a historian is a matter of doubt; he was like today’s celebrity journalists, eager to pick up juicy morsels about the great figures of the past who were destined to govern the history of their times. 

Cleopatra – asp at her breast

Nick Walton of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust explains in a 12-min video how Shakespeare made Cleopatra the central character in his play. He says that “Shakespeare added significantly to the mythology around Egypt's last queen. He developed his historical sources to create a woman who is at once powerful, jealous, humorous, stern, intelligent, vain, courageous, vulnerable, stubborn, fickle, loyal, down-to-earth, and otherworldly.”

What an unusual collaboration over 1,600 years between Plutarch and Shakespeare! The former merely mentions that Cleopatra came sailing “her barge in the river of Cydnus, the poop whereof was of gold, the sails of purple and the oars of silver, which kept stroke in rowing after the sound of the music of flutes, howboys, cithernes, viols, and such other instruments as they played upon in the barge.” 

WS turns that account into pure poetry:

The barge she sat in, like a burnish'd throne,
Burned on the water: the poop was beaten gold;
Purple the sails, and so perfumed that
The winds were lovesick with them; the oars were silver,
Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke, and made
The water which they beat to follow faster,
As amorous of their strokes. For her own person,
It beggar'd all description: she did lie
In her pavilion, cloth-of-gold of tissue,

The word barge is in Plutarch, but see how Shakespeare has added the alliteration of burnish’d, burned, and beaten.

The barge she sat in ... was of beaten gold

No less than other plays A&C is full of phrases you will remember once you read it,

– A lass unparalleled

– A morsel for a monarch

– I have / Imortal longings in me 

– Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale /Her infinite variety.

– The stroke of death is as a lover's pinch /Which hurts and is desired.

– My salad days, /When I was green in judgment

– There's beggary in the love that can be reckoned.

As in all the works of Shakespeare puns abound, some bawdy – meant to entertain the playgoers – some adding depth and a layer of added meaning to the play.

Bawdy:
O happy horse, to bear the weight of Antony

"Horse" refers to Antony’s warhorse (military might) and sexual prowess (horsemanship = riding a lover). The line drips with innuendo—Cleopatra envies the beast that carries him.

I am dying, Egypt, dying.
‘Die’ was Elizabethan slang for orgasm – Antony’s death throes mirror an erotic climax.

Clean:
The band that seems to tie their friendship together will be the very strangler of their amity.

‘band’ can mean both a unifying bond and a constricting noose.

He wears the rose / Of youth upon him
‘rose’  symbolises both beauty and the fleeting nature of youth (like a flower that withers).

Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor in the film Cleopatra (1963), directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz

A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini – March 28, 2025

A Thousand Splendid Suns, 2007 first edition dust jacket

The novel dwells chiefly on the fate of women in Afghanistan, seen through the intertwined lives of Mariam and Laila. Mariam is the illegitimate daughter of a rich man in Herat (close to Iran) too proud to bring her up in his household; he therefore gives her away in marriage to a shoemaker, Rasheed, in Kabul. The other woman, Laila, is a war orphan who becomes the second wife of the same shoemaker.

We follow them through decades of hardship and political turmoil in Afghanistan, as the author exposes their travails under puppets of the Soviet Union and the sectarian warlords, while the divisions in Afghan society tear it apart. The novel is about motherhood and sacrifice, and the resilience of these two women. Mariam as the senior wife harbours a resentment for Laila as the usurper. Then slowly, the relations thaw when a child is born to Laila and two women assume an uneasy alliance initially, which blossoms into a mother-daughter relationship as time goes on.

The sadness you feel for Afghanistan is because of the regime’s intolerance of all the arts and education, coupled with a systematic subjugation of women. The Taliban, so intent on banning, have all but forgotten the times when women were doctors, university faculty, and school teachers, playing an equal role in national life. Today we only view Afghan women as blue burqa-clad dolls silently tiptoeing behind a male family member.

The author, Khalid Hosseini, was an Afghan by birth who escaped at the age of 15 with his diplomat father and grew up in the West, settling in California as a doctor. The success of his very first novel impelled him to take up writing full-time. All three of his books have have reached the bestseller charts. He is also a UNHCR goodwill ambassador. A short profile of Khalid Hosseini is here.

The title of the novel is taken from a poem by the Persian poet Saib-e-Tabrizi who loved Kabul and wrote a poem about it in the seventeenth century; Laila’s father Babi quotes two lines in Chapter 26 when he is forced to leave Kabul: Tabrizi’s poem had been swirling in his head all day, but all he could remember were these two lines:

One could not count the moons that shimmer on her roofs,
Or the thousand splendid suns that hide behind her walls.

The entire poem Kabul is a love letter to Kabul.

Tabriz is in the East Azerbaijan province of northwestern Iran

Tabriz celebrates eight famous poets (including Shams-e-Tabrizi, Rumi’s spiritual guide) with individual mausoleums erected to them. There is a graveyard in Tabriz called the Maqbaratoshoara (‘Mausoleum of Poets’) where some 400 poets and mystics are buried with famous men. We can appreciate why Persia is the origin of so much poetry and the poetic forms that have permeated the culture of of West Asia and South Asia.

Maqbarat-o-shoara, also known as the Mausoleum of Poets, built in the 1970s in Tabriz, is a monument to honour the 400 or so Iranian poets, mystics, and notable persons buried in the grounds

However Saib-e-Tabrizi is buried in Isfahan, the magical city of culture with scores of famous monuments, palaces, and mosques.

1967 monument in Isfahan to Saib-e-Tabrizi (1592 – 1676) who was the greatest sonneteer of his time. It is home to a collection of around 120,000 couplets inscribed on the walls in marble

Poetry Session - 24 February, 2025

Temsula Ao is among the women poets of the North East of India who taught English at North Eastern Hill University, Shillong, the capital of Meghalaya. Fluent in Assamese, the language in which she was educated, she wrote her poems in English, publishing at least 7 collections. Arundhaty chose her poem Dream in which she has a conversation with Shakespeare.

We had Devika reciting from Rudyard Kipling who has been chosen numerous times. The poem about a lost road through the woods is a recollection of something lost:
where the ring-dove broods,
And the badgers roll at ease,
There was once a road through the woods.

Geetha’s choice was Jiddu Krishnamurti who was brought up to be a seer and mystic and later threw off that persona and freed himself. In this poem he discovers the entire tree from a single leaf:
The entire tree, its great trunk,
Its many branches, and its thousand leaves,
And an immense part of the sky.
I swore there there was no other tree, no other part to the sky –

His schools survive as a legacy of an approach to eduction through nature, the most famous being the Rishi Valley School in Madanapalle, AP. There is a rock, I am told, where students go to meditate. Birdwatching is a particular activity that is encouraged.

The Meditation rock at Rishi Valley School

Joe had recourse to a poem by a poet who lamented the great calamity of the Palestinian people in Gaza. Refaat Alareer who foresaw his own death left a death poem about what should happen afterward. It would cause a little boy to look up and see hope in the sky. The poem If I Should Die has been translated into hundreds of languages, and Joe preferred to recite it in a simple Hindi version with the original English alongside.

Kavita’s choice of Sarojini Naidu as a poet was a poem that describes bangle sellers who brought a ray of golden light:
Who will buy these delicate, bright
Rainbow-tinted circles of light?
Lustrous tokens of radiant lives,
For happy daughters and happy wives.

Sarojini Naidu (1879-1949) was known as the ‘Nightingale of India’ because of her lyrical poetry. She was a political activist, and freedom fighter too.

KumKum chose two poems of Rainer Maria Rilke, a favourite of Bobby Paul George who was a co-founder of KRG. They are humanistic poems and both have a sad ring, one extending empathy for a cripple, and the other for a lonely star that seems to call out to him:

I long to still my beating heart.
Beneath the sky’s vast dome I long to pray . . .
Of all the stars there must be far away
A single star which still exists apart.

Pamela chose a poem by a young black poet Amanda Gorman who was called on to celebrate the inauguration of Mr Biden as President in 2021 by reading a prose-poem titled The Hill We Climb. Her costume (a red Prada headband and yellow Prada coat) was more striking than the words, mostly a borrowed feel-good kind of rhetoric:

And, yes, we are far from polished, far from pristine, but that doesn’t mean we are striving to form a union that is perfect.
We are striving to forge our union with purpose.
To compose a country committed to all cultures, colors, characters and conditions of man.

For my money there should be a ‘not’ before the first striving ...

Amanda Gorman Photographed by Annie Leibovitz, Vogue, May 2021

She became a fashion influencer immediately afterwards with a photo-shoot for the Vogue magazine.

The moment when Poetry struck Pablo Neruda and changed his course in life is celebrated in a poem of that name that Saras read:

Poetry arrived

in search of me. I don’t know, I don’t know where
it came from, from winter or a river.
…
my eyes were blind,
and something started in my soul,
fever or forgotten wings,
and I made my own way,
deciphering

that fire,

and I wrote the first faint line,

His romantic ardour is expressed feverishly in the poem Don't Go Far Off.

may your silhouette never dissolve on the beach;

may your eyelids never flutter into the empty distance.

Don’t leave me for a second, my dearest,

Shoba selected poems by Gwendolyn Brooks, author of a score of books and the first black woman to serve as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry, at the Library of Congress. Sadie and Maud tells the story of two sisters, and though Maud is the one who avoided trouble she is described at the end thus:
Is a thin brown mouse.
She is living all alone
In this old house.

Thomo selected the uncle of the folk singer Pete Seeger, singer and composer of famous songs like Where Have All The Flowers Gone and We Shall Overcome. The uncle, Alan Seeger, was one of the many poets sacrificed on the vast fields of massacre which the fields of Belgium became in WWI – Ypres, Passchendaele, and so on. Like Alareer in modern Gaza, Alan Seeger had a premonition of death when writing his poem I Have a Rendezvous with Death:
I have a rendezvous with Death
On some scarred slope of battered hill,
When Spring comes round again this year
And the first meadow-flowers appear.
…
And I to my pledged word am true,
I shall not fail that rendezvous.

Th final poem was by the poet and diplomat who wrote those unforgettable lines in To My Coy Mistress, but here he provided for Zakia, The Definition of Love. This poet knows the intimate geometry of love:
As lines, so loves oblique may well
Themselves in every angle greet;
But ours so truly parallel,
Though infinite, can never meet.

Marvell had the gift of stating in rhyme pithily and inimitably the essence of human experience.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid, Jan 24, 2025

 

The Reluctant Fundamentalist first Edition cover 2007

When Mohsin Hamid, the young  British Pakistani writer, began his second novel the demolition of the World Trade Tower by the Sept 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States had not yet occurred. He re-wrote the novel again  and again and took seven years to complete it. Ultimately, the novel turned on Changez Khan’s dawning realisation that something had changed fundamentally in the acceptability of Muslims in America after those attacks. The country would no longer be the land of his youthful dreams.

The twin towers attack of Sep 11, 2001 when airliners were flown into the towers by terrorists – the south tower is on fire and the north tower billows smoke

In  between he has a slow-burning love affair with a young woman called Erica. But she has still not come out of her depression following the grief over her boyfriend Chris, who died in the 9/11 attack. Changez loses track of Erica, but continues to think of her fondly, even after returning to Pakistan, holding onto the hope that she might one day come to him. 

When the North Tower collapsed this fire engine was damaged beyond repair — it is now an exhibit at the 9/11 Museum. Among first responders 441 died on that day

What makes Changez give up on his dreams is an eye-opening conversation he has with the head of the literary division of a company (Juan-Bautista), he has been sent to evaluate in Chile by his Wall Street company.  In a conversation he is told of young Christian boys who were captured by the Ottoman Turks in battle and then brainwashed into becoming Janissaries to work for their new masters. The implication is Changez has been similarly indoctrinated by his Wall Street firm to work against his own interests; he has become a hired gun. Juan-Bautista prompts Changez to examine his own identity and his relationship with America, which helps Changez see himself as a kind of "cultural outsider" exploited by American power structures. 

From there a transformation takes place and perhaps the poetry of Pablo Neruda one of whose houses south of Valparaiso he visits, has something to do with his deeper appreciation of his own poetic roots (his father was a poet in the Punjab).

Sumbal Maqsood of Government College University, Lahore, wrote in a paper titled Interrogating the Fundamentals of Identity: Changez’s Defining Act in the Reluctant Fundamentalist about Changez Khan’s dilemma:

“The standardized tests of America (like SAT) were traps to attract the intellectual cream of other nations, leaving the home countries deprived of brain power, while the migrants became servers of a tentacled capitalist cause. Changez realized gradually that he was just enabling the tentacles to grow more out of bounds.” 

The Reluctant Fundamentalist was adapted as a 2012 film in the political thriller drama genre, directed by Mira Nair and starring Riz Ahmed, Kate Hudson, and Liev Schreiber

The novel was later turned into a film directed by Mira Nair available for viewing free on Youtube. Many scenes are changed: Juan-Bautista in Valparaiso is turned into a book publisher in Istanbul who publishes in translation great authors from the Middle East and Asia. The book becomes more a thriller in the latter half of the film about secret CIA intervention in Lahore to rescue one of their operatives – there is no such story in the novel. In the film Changez Khan is less of a non-violent protester about American interventionism, and more of an activist goading students until he steps unwillingly into the terrorist backdrop to fundamentalism in Pakistan. Readers may on the whole prefer the novel because it leaves things unresolved at the end.

In the film Changez (played by Rizwan Ahmed, the British Pakistani actor) learns that the Istanbul publisher whose company they were evaluating, has published a Turkish translation of his father, Ajmal Khan's, poetry