“What an incredible 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 for political activism. As an American-born author of Korean ancestry, I favored these authors in principle, however their precise work didn’t soar off the web page for me, an English-only reader. If I wasn’t “getting” it, what probability did it have for others who can be studying their work in translation?
After I began writing my novel Identical Mattress Completely different Goals 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 significantly; 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 fame. Ko has denied the accusations.) The primary scene I wrote was set at a New York feast held in Echo’s honor, at which his (white) U.S. writer, Tanner Gradual, says to the narrator:
“Echo is probably the most implausible Korean author you’ve by no means heard of. A state of affairs that’s going to alter, and alter quickly … Now, I’m not alleged to say this, however a supply tells me Echo’s on the key lengthy record for the … you already know.”
“Eh?”
“The Huge N.”
“I don’t know what that’s.”
“The Nobel Prize.”
[Read: The Nobel winner whose writing speaks to everyone]
Identical Mattress took 9 years to write down, throughout which era Korean music (BTS), movies (Parasite), and TV reveals (Squid Recreation) exploded into world sensations. In October 2015, I visited Seoul for a publishing convention; one speaker, alluding to the rising reputation of Ok-pop, instructed (naively, I believed) that Korean books may equally profit from being branded as Ok-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 exhausting 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 couple of months after my article appeared, Han’s 2007 novel, The Vegetarian, was printed in the USA. It went on to win the Man Booker Worldwide Prize and was named one of many 10 greatest books of the 12 months by the New York Instances. In contrast to many non-American Nobel laureates, who may be pretty unknown within the U.S. earlier than profitable 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 buddy texted me, “What number of current winners have a guide on Amazon with 9000+ critiques?”
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 all the time considered her as utterly unremarkable in each manner.” 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 manner, from the hair on her head (“neither lengthy nor quick”) to the plain footwear on her ft. However she’s freed from “drawbacks” and thus makes appropriate spouse materials.
All of this can be demolished in brief 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 may be The Vegan—she chucks the eggs and milk as properly.) 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 concerning 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 current Korean novels (notably Cho Nam-Joo’s Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982, which turned a greatest 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 would discover readers all over the world for many years to return.
A rustic’s literature is different, however there are secret via 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 anywhere or time, a hero of mine whose fugitive work and tortured life nonetheless baffle and fascinate at present. He died in 1937, with no guide to his title. However a long time later, Han got here throughout a line from his journals—“I consider that people must be crops”—that impressed The Vegetarian. What an incredible day for Korea.