Han Kang: Sublime and Subversive

AT 4:30PM IST when the Swedish Academy announced that the Nobel Prize in Literature had been awarded to South Korean author Han Kang, the collective response from many a reader in India (and perhaps elsewhere) was, “The author of The Vegetarian?” It is not without reason that Kang’s less-than-200-page 2015 novel is the one that made her known to English-language readers. It was the Korean author’s translated debut in the Anglo­phone world, 10 years after she had written the original and it went on to win the Man Booker International Prize 2016. Translated by Deborah Smith, the novel would top bestseller lists because it was a book unlike any other.

The Nobel citation celebrates Kang as she “confronts historical traumas and invisible sets of rules and, in each of her works, exposes the fragility of human life. She has a unique awareness of the connections between body and soul, the living and the dead, and in her poetic and experimental style has become an innovator in contemporary prose.” The Vegetarian aptly demonstrates both her psychological acuity and her literary innovations. The opening line is Kafkaesque, but it is also more than that. It reads: “Before my wife turned vegetarian, I’d always thought of her as completely unremarkable in every way.” Divided into three sections the novel is told from three points of view: the office-going husband, the artist brother-in-law, and the overwhelmed older sister. We hear the wife’s words only sparingly when they appear in italics in the text: “My clothes still wet with blood. Hide, hide behind the trees…My bloody hands. My bloody mouth. In that barn, what had I done?”

Fifty-three-year old Kang is an interesting choice for the highest award in literature because her writing can be savage and unsettling. At a time when the slightest affliction comes with ‘trigger warnings’, her work spits at such sissyness and politeness. She is a writer who minces no words and is not squeamish about bloodletting. Her books are not only works of soaring imagination, they also plumb the darkness of the soul. Anglophone critics have been quick to attribute the bizarreness to ‘cultural’ differences, but that is to diminish her literary merit. Her books might remind one of Japanese authors like Sayaka Murata, but Kang’s genius lies in her uniqueness, her play with plot, the depth of her metaphors, her ability to transform wave, cloud, blizzard, and not because of her cultural background.

The Vegetarian is not a tale of the change in dietary habits, instead it is a parable for a descent into madness. Her 2017 autobiographical novel The White Book might seem like a meditation on colour, starting with a list of white things, ‘salt’, ‘snow’, ‘ice’, ‘shroud’ but it is an investigation into death, mourning and fragility. Kang’s books are a reminder that life is, most often, not what it seems to be.

Born to a father who is a well-known author, Kang is also invested in art and music. She started out by publishing poems in 1993. And then moved on to short stories, followed by novels. She has written 20-plus books in Korean, which includes children’s books and essays. Only six of these have been translated into English, and one can expect that with the Nobel Prize that is likely to change.

In The White Book, Kang’s various interests tango. There is poetry, photography and prose. The book draws from the death of the narrator’s baby sister, who died two hours after her birth. How do you make a book of that? It is only on Page 125 where the narrator says: “She grew up inside this story… She was born prematurely, at seven months.” But prior to that all we get are images and reflections in a way where the human becomes transcendental. A single handkerchief is compared to a “bird with its wings half furled…like a soul tentatively sounding out a place it might alight.”

Han is the first South Korean winner of the prize, and at a time when the Nobel Prize is most often awarded to institutions, this is a refreshing change as here is an author who perhaps has many quivers still to deliver. Her work is unapologetically visceral and English readers will hopefully get to read more of her prose which reminds us of “vanishing fragility” and this “oppressive weight of beauty”, as she writes in The White Book.

Han KangliteratureMan Booker International PrizeNobel PrizeThe VegetarianThe White Book