The Nobel Prize in Literature 2024 was awarded to South Korean author Han Kang “for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life.”
Literature laureate Kang’s physical empathy for extreme life stories is reinforced by her increasingly charged metaphorical style.
Han Kang began her career in 1993 with the publication of a number of poems in the magazine ‘Literature and Society’. Her prose debut came in 1995 with the short story collection ‘Love of Yeosu’.
If you’re unsure which of her books to read first, here’s a list to help you decide.
The Vegetarian
The Vegetarian is Han Kang’s international breakthrough novel which won the International Booker prize in 2016. It’s the story of a middle-aged Korean woman who one night suddenly decides not to eat meat anymore.
The vegetarian herself is silent in the novel, her story is instead told in three different narratives by her husband, her brother-in-law and her older sister (in that order).
Their different reactions, from abhorrence to sexual fascination to poisonous envy, stand in sharp contrast to the woman’s own mute refusal to back down or to admit to any guilt for the shame she has brought to her family. Through these responses we get a sharp portrait of a patriarchal society obsessed by careerism and rigid sometimes tyrannical social norms and conventions.
Greek Lessons
This short but intense and psychologically penetrating novel is an intimate portrait of two individuals who have lost, or are in of the process of losing, the most vital links that connect them to the exterior world.
After having suffered domestic abuse the female protagonist has retreated into muteness, while the male protagonist slowly is losing his sight due to a hereditary disease. In order to regain an ability to communicate the woman is taking courses in Ancient Greek – since a language not longer spoken will not be able to hurt her – while the man losing his sight is her Greek teacher.
A delicate love story of sorts, the novel traces their attempt to if not to overcome so at least try to find common ground in their shared bereavement. It’s also a book about language, how words can help us give shape and meaning to our outer and inner world but also tear at and destroy what is most delicate in all of us: our identity.
Human Acts
As in her latest novel, We Do Not Part, scheduled for publication in English in January 2025, Human Acts takes an oblique, but terrifying and totally convincing look at her country’s not so distant past. Through many different ever shifting perspectives, which create an almost unbearable narrative suspense, the novel chronicles the lives of many people either taking part or as victims innocently being caught up in a student uprising in May 1980 in the town of Gwangju, where the author spent her childhood and early youth, an uprising that was brutally crushed by the then ruling military junta.
As in many other of her works, the border between perpetrator and victim, body and soul, or even between living and dead, is fluctuating, which is reflected in a language both straightforward and subtle.
ALSO READ: Victor Ambros & Gary Ruvkun win ‘Nobel Prize 2024 in Medicine’ for miRNA discovery
Han gives in this and several other novels a new meaning to the expression “living with the past”, considered as remnants of a reality that you can neither shy away from nor resist. Through her honest and truly awe-inspiring literary works we live and relive our pasts continuously.
