Han Kang

A word about our new Nobel Prize for Literature. The only of her books I have read is The Vegetarian, though the others look great too. This is kind of author that people were hoping the Nobel reforms of a few years ago would lead to winning the prize. This weird little novel is about a woman who stops eating meat and then withers away after nightmares about blood and guts of that industry, but is actually rejecting the patriarchy that dominates her life. Evidently all her novels have these types of political themes. From E. Tammy Kim in The New Yorker’s daily newsletter, which I get by email so I don’t have a link:

In works such as “The Vegetarian,” “Human Acts,” “The White Book,” and “Greek Lessons,” she applies a light, often experimental touch to heavy themes: women’s experiences under patriarchal rule; the buried histories of twentieth- and twenty-first-century South Korea.

Han came to the attention of most readers outside South Korea with “The Vegetarian” (translated into English by Deborah Smith), which tells the story of Yeong-hye, a woman in Seoul who responds to a series of gory nightmares (“great blood-red gashes of meat”) by giving up her carnivorous ways and rejecting her husband and extended family. I’m partial to a larger-scale novel, “Human Acts” (also translated by Smith), about a people’s uprising and U.S.-backed massacre, in 1980, in the southern city of Gwangju, where Han spent her early childhood. In an author’s note, she reflects on a grim source of inspiration: a boy, killed in the massacre, whom her father, the writer Han Seung-won, had taught in middle school. “How had the seasons kept on turning for me, when time had stopped forever for him that May?”

Han’s latest novel is “I Do Not Bid Farewell” (forthcoming in English)—a beautiful, mysterious story built around another historic tragedy, a pogrom on Jeju Island after the Korean War, told from the perspective of three women characters. A few months after it came out, in 2021, I met her for a vegetarian meal in Seoul. (We have known each other for a while.) South Korea was trending authoritarian, increasingly steered by male grievance, which got me thinking about 2016, when Han and Smith won the International Booker Prize for “The Vegetarian.” That same year, a feminist movement took hold in South Korea, #MeToo avant la lettre, and made the literary world its first bit of housecleaning. Ko Un, a poet who’d long been considered South Korea’s most likely winner of a Nobel Prize, was revealed to have been an abuser; no one reads him anymore. Korea’s #MeToo uprising has since shrivelled, but Han and many other women writers—Kyung-sook Shin, Kim Hyesoon, Hwang Jung-eun—are still in their rightful place, defining contemporary Korean literature.

As I general rule, I try to make about 1/3 or a little more than that of the novels I read from outside the US and European experience. That’s a lot to read and we all only have so much time, but sometimes it leads you to read great authors before they get this kind of international recognition, so this makes me happy. Plus The Vegetarian is just a great book.