1. Han Kang’s work moves on a double plane. He tells us that words are insufficient, but recognizes that it is the only thing we have at hand to address personal pain (The white paper, Greek class), family violence and social alienation (The vegetarian) or the collective wound (human acts).
2. Like many Koreans of his generation, Han Kang (1970) grew up reading Latin American writers. Korea was far from being a technological power and saw itself in the mirror in the dictatorships of the Southern Cone and the Caribbean, in that tension between a rural world that was falling apart and an urban one that was emerging with the blow of cement.
3. human acts It takes place in Gwanju during the 1980 massacre that led to the end of a forty-year dictatorship. Months earlier, Han Kang had moved with his family to the Suyu-ri district in Seoul. Images of a coliseum full of bodies and flies traveled to her. The book moves between the gruesome details of a court report, Rulfian echoes and the pain of survivor syndrome.
4. Suyu-ri is mentioned several times in Greek class. It is a definitive psychogeographic element in a novel where a dead language occupies a central place along with the progressive loss of speech and vision of the protagonists. However, Korean audiences do not associate Han Kang with Suyu-ri. For everyone it is the place where the most famous comedian in the country grew up. Not even a Nobel Prize winner will be able to unseat Yoo Jae-Suk, omnipresent on television and in advertisements for instant noodles, energy drinks and ice cream.
5. Han Kang’s father is a writer and so is his older brother. With the Nobel Prize, the youngest of the family has subverted the sacred patrilineal order in which the eldest son has all the privileges and responsibilities.
6. Father and daughter won the Yi Sang Award (1988/2005). Yi Sang is perhaps the most radical writer in Korean literature. He wrote during the 1930s under the Japanese occupation of Korea. An architect by profession, he published poems that include numbers, lines, points, equations and diagrams. His is the phrase that Han Kang was obsessed with when writing The vegetarian: “I think humans should be plants.”
Andrés Sánchez Braun (EFE)
7. As in so many works that aspire to be literary, the woman protagonist of The vegetarian refusing to eat meat is an allegory. Saying no to your husband and family is a highly disruptive act in a society governed by nunchithat ability to correctly read a situation so as not to bother others and above all to not alter hierarchies.
8. In some libraries and schools in the Seoul metropolitan region The vegetarian It is prohibited for distorting sexuality among children.
9. Sunme Yoon read The vegetarian and she was so impressed that she decided to translate it into Spanish. He convinced the Argentine publisher Bajo La Luna to publish it in 2012, four years before it came out in English and won the Man Booker Prize. Until then, no one had heard of Han Kang outside of Korea. It was Yoon, raised in Buenos Aires, who was responsible for paving the way for him in the West (The Vegetarian It was only translated into Japanese. To this day, the writer considers this fact as the beginning of a domino effect and is proud that her literature has entered through the least expected door.
10. During the right-wing government of Park Geun-hye (2013-2017), Han Kang was blacklisted on behalf of human acts.
11. After receiving the Booker in 2016, Han Kang was eager to disappear. “It is impossible to worry about attention and write at the same time.” When she received a second call from the Swedish academy after the Nobel announcement, she sounded terrified.
12. The award came hours after the holiday in honor of Hangul, the Korean alphabet created in 1443 by the court of King Sejong so that the poorest could read and write. Until then, only the nobility read and wrote in Chinese. The king’s critics contemptuously called him amkeul (letter for women) thanks to the ease of learning it.
13. The writer suffers from cataclysmic migraines. “Knowing myself vulnerable makes me humble,” he said. Han Kang’s literature aspires to silence.