an Kang may have been an unexpected winner of the Nobel Prize last November, but Urdu literary readers were very keen to welcome her. No less than three translators emerged with the claim that they have translated or are in the process of translating Kang`s most famous novel, The Vegetarian, into Urdu.

But it was Hoori Noorani, the publisher of Maktaba-iDaniyal, who had obtained the rights for the translation from Han Kang herself, through her agent, and had commissioned Asma Hussain for its translation. Hoori was among the first in Pakistan who had read the novel after Han Kang won the Man Booker International Prize in 2016. Asma Hussain, the translator, is currently living in Denmark and before that was teaching Urdu at an American University.

The novel is unique in many ways. The protagonist, Yeong-hye, after seeing a dream, suddenly stops eating anything which has to do with animals. This is her act of defiance in a society where being a carnivore is a norm. Her act of becoming a `vegetarian` has some symbolic and psychological connotations.

She was subjected to regular torture by her father, who was a war veteran. That`s one explanation of why she abhors eating the animal meat which is obtained after slaughtering them. Her husband is a common guy, doing a nine-to-five routine job and living a routine life, which must have bored Yeong-hye.

The story is in three parts, each focusing on Yeong-hye, the main protagonist, from the perspective of a different character. Yeong-hye, interestingly, seldom speaks for herself in the novel. This aspect adds to the problem of understanding her character. That is what Han Kang wanted to convey: the impalpability of a psychologically challenged person for thecommon people around her.

The first part is narrated by Yeong-hye`s husband. The narrative of her husband is interspersed with Yeong-hye`s dreams. These dreams are intense and filled with torturous and gory experiences.

The husband expects nothing special from his wife, but is unable to comprehend the psychological degression of his wife.

We are reminded that Yeong-hye used to draw comic speech bubbles before she became deranged. An industrialised society lacks empathy and the impossibility of inter-human communication through speech in such a society is also one of the themes in this novel .

Mr Cheong, the common nine-to-five guy of this society, fails to understand his wife, does not want to invest emotionally in her and leaves her with a divorce.

But the story doesn`t end here.

In the second part, the husband of Yeong-hye`s sister In-hye comes into contact with Yeong-hye. He is `speech-less` before Yeong-hye, considering her as an object of beauty. He communicates with her through colours. He wants to paint her body with flowers. Yeonghye, who seemed to be indifferent towards life and human beings, strangely complies.

Here Han Kang drives Yeong-hye to fulfil a male reader`s daydreams and lets her brother-in-law make flowers on her naked body. This racy part only solidifies the unsettling effect that the third and last part brings. The voyeuristic relief of the second part only solidifies the overall disturbing effect of the novel.

Han Kang unleashes a more disquieting episode on the unprepared reader in the third part. I would not like to spill the story here, but how she is able to take the reader to some unexpected situations is a study in good fiction. The narrative, meanwhile, remains sparse and poetic.

The writer has connected the instinct of torture to eating meat.

The symbol of a `tree` is here the main symbol of the novel, whereby she has emphasised the importance of reconnecting the human race to nature, as a tree remains connected to the soil and feeds itself from it. The vegetarianism of Yeong-hye intensifies and she decides, eventually, not to eat anything at all.

She once stands upside down, connecting her head to the floor and expanding her arms and legs in the air like a tree. The symbolism of a tree is more evident in the third part, `Flaming Trees`, but is also evident in the second part, where Yeong-hye`s brother-in-law paints flowers on her body and she, for once,seems happy and fulfilled.

There are other characters in this novel, but we see the progression of only two characters. We come to know that Yeong-hye`s sister is also subjected to parental and societal pressure and expectations and is also on the brink of madness after what her husband does to her sister. The only reason she is holding on is because of her little son, towards whom she feels a responsibility.

The characters of Yeong-hye`s husband Mr Cheong and Inhye`s artist husband suddenly disappear, leaving the two sisters to clean their wreckage. The torturing father of both the sisters also decides not to meddle in their affairs anymore, once Yeong-hye is in a psychiatric hospital. Patriarchy is shorn off in this manner by the novelist, but the women have to pay the price of lifting the burden alone.

The sister In-hye`s husband is an artist, who is only concerned about his art and unsettles the life of his wife when she comes to know about his secret. Nonetheless, he is the one who seems to understand the strange dream that Yeong-hye saw and because of which she decides to become a vegetarian.

Yeong-hye, her sister and her sister`s artist husband, all three are sensitive souls but they can not bring solace to each other. Of these, only In-hye is blessed with a sense of responsibility, which the novelist has shown is the binding force in a family, and which is lacking in other members of the family we see in this novel.

This translation is a translation of the English translation by Deborah Smith. The English translation has been both praised and criticised by reviewers. Charse Yun, a Korean writer who teaches translation, has called the English translation, `brilliant but flawed` that `worked spectacularly in English.` But that translation has won two of the most coveted literary prizes in the world for Han Kang. The Nobel prize committee is, we know, always interested in garnering a controversy which it was able to brew this time as well.

The Urdu translation is flawless and is able to convey a new kind of novel to Urdu readers, where a woman`s suffering is portrayed through some new symbols and a stark depiction of emotional burden and angst. It surely works well in Urdu. It should be a must read for Pakistani fiction readers. Asma Hussain is a new translator and we expect many more translations from her in future.

The reviewer is a poet, novelist and translator. His third collection of Urdu poetry, Gul-i-Dogana is about to be published