Han Kang’s Transgressive Artwork

“What a fantastic day for Korea!” my mother wrote to me on Thursday. “Nobel for Han Kang!”

For the previous few a long time, a number of South Korean authors have been bruited about as contenders for the Nobel Prize in Literature, notably the poet Ko Un and the novelist Hwang Sok-yong, elder statesmen who have been each beforehand jailed forpolitical activism. As an American-born author of Korean ancestry, I favored these authors in concept, however their precise work didn’t bounce off the web page for me, an English-only reader. If I wasn’t “getting” it, what likelihood did it have for others who can be studying their work in translation?

Once I began writing my novel Identical Mattress Totally different Desires in 2014, the considered a South Korean Nobel laureate was very a lot on my thoughts. As in: It’s going to by no means occur. I remembered attending a writer’s lunch in 2008 for Hwang, whose gravitas and gentleness impressed me enormously; sadly, I used to be the one member of the media there. No person cares about Korea, I believed. For Identical Mattress, I dreamt up a genius Korean novelist I known as Echo, a former enfant horrible loosely impressed by Hwang and Ko. (Sexual-misconduct allegations have since tarnished the latter’s repute. Ko has denied the accusations.) The primary scene I wrote was set at a New York banquet held in Echo’s honor, at which his (white) U.S. writer, Tanner Sluggish, says to the narrator:

“Echo is essentially the most unbelievable Korean author you’ve by no means heard of. A scenario that’s going to vary, and alter quickly … Now, I’m not presupposed to say this, however a supply tells me Echo’s on the key lengthy record for the … you already know.”
“Eh?”
“The Massive N.”
“I don’t know what that’s.”
“The Nobel Prize.”

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Identical Mattress took 9 years to put in writing, throughout which era Korean music (BTS), movies (Parasite), and TV exhibits (Squid Recreation) exploded into world sensations. In October 2015, I visited Seoul for a publishing convention; one speaker, alluding to the rising recognition of Okay-pop, advised (naively, I believed) that Korean books may equally profit from being branded as Okay-lit. That very same month, I printed an essay in The New Yorker on Korean literature in translation, discussing a raft of works that had not too long ago been issued by Dalkey Archive. It was a haphazard immersion, with publication dates from the Nineteen Thirties to the early aughts, and titles starting from soft-spoken to surreal. Most of the books have been good; one was nice. However it was laborious to think about any of them (notably of their uniformly drab covers) getting a lot outdoors play.

Then one thing occurred that I didn’t foresee. A number of months after my article appeared, Han’s 2007 novel, The Vegetarian, was printed in the US. It went on to win the Man Booker Worldwide Prize and was named one of many 10 finest books of the 12 months by the New York Occasions. Not like many non-American Nobel laureates, who could be pretty unknown within the U.S. earlier than successful the prize, Han, because of that novel’s success, already had a large and passionate stateside readership earlier than Thursday’s announcement from Stockholm. As a good friend texted me, “What number of latest winners have a e book on Amazon with 9000+ opinions?”

Han’s English-language debut (championed by her younger British translator, Deborah Smith) begins with a deceptively placid sentence: “Earlier than my spouse turned vegetarian, I’d at all times considered her as utterly unremarkable in each means.” The narrator claims to hunt the “center course,” however he’s a garden-variety chauvinist who simply desires a docile, subservient spouse. There’s no nice bodily attraction; Yeong-hye is totally common in each means, from the hair on her head (“neither lengthy nor brief”) to the plain sneakers on her ft. However she’s freed from “drawbacks” and thus makes appropriate spouse materials.

All of this can be demolished briefly order. One morning, the narrator wakes up late to see {that a} unusually dazed Yeong-hye has disposed of all their meat—pork stomach, shabu-shabu beef, dumplings, eel. (A extra correct title could be The Vegan—she chucks the eggs and milk as effectively.) The narrator’s rising alarm over his spouse’s new weight-reduction plan and withering physique is interspersed with italicized entries in her voice: desires or reminiscences or each, together with one in regards to the butchering—and consumption—of a canine that bit her as a woman. Han’s starvation artist wonders: “Why are my edges all sharpening—what I’m going to gouge?” The reply, it appears, is Korea’s patriarchal society.

[Read: A novel in which language hits its limit—and keeps on going]

Different latest Korean novels (notably Cho Nam-Joo’s Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982, which grew to become a finest vendor in South Korea when it was printed, in 2016) have criticized sexism in that nation. However The Vegetarian stands out for its unwillingness to remain nonetheless. Its tripartite construction retains the reader off-balance and complicates Yeong-hye’s act of resistance. It’s a feral work of creativeness, and regardless of—or due to—its prickliness, it’ll discover readers around the globe for many years to come back.

A rustic’s literature is assorted, however there are secret by means of traces, hidden traditions. I’m reminded of the truth that when a part of The Vegetarian appeared in Korea as a novella, it gained the Yi Sang Literary Award, named after one of many strangest writers of anyplace or time, a hero of mine whose fugitive work and tortured life nonetheless baffle and fascinate at present. He died in 1937, with no e book to his title. However a long time later, Han got here throughout a line from his journals—“I imagine that people needs to be crops”—that impressed The Vegetarian. What a fantastic day for Korea.