![]() To the trees I have been listening as closely as a naturalist meditator might and yet it’s been difficult for me to determine from them, in their mystical silence, what approach to take in either appreciating or explicating Han Kang’s Man-Booker International Prize winning novel. ![]() Trees surround me in the East Mountain foothills of Cascade, Idaho, where I am writing this essay on Han Kang’s The Vegetarian. “When we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy.” ( From Hermann Hesse’s Wanderings: Notes and Sketches) “Art is here to prove, and to help one bear, the fact that all safety is an illusion.” (From James Baldwin’s talk “The Artist’s Struggle for Integrity” (1963) Commentary on The Vegetarian by Han Kang, translated from the Korean by Deborah Smith (New York: Hogarth Press, 2015) ![]()
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