Han Kang
A congratulations and breakdown of her translated works
I’ve long been a fan of Han Kang and, like many others, was exceptionally happy when she won the Nobel Prize in Literature this year!
In an interview with Jenny Rydén, Kang responded to the question of who inspired her works with this: “ For me, since when I was a child, all writers have been collective. They are searching meanings in life. Sometimes they are lost and sometimes they are determined and all their efforts and all their strengths have been my inspiration. So it’s very difficult for me to pick some names of the inspiration. It’s very difficult for me.”
Her work, in turn, has inspired so many people with its hard-wringing truths and beautiful imagery. Many of her novels confront historical events and explore/question societal norms.
It is in those murky depths that we find what it means to be human. Kang manages, in the death and hurt and pain, to find a source of hope and instill that in her work.
The Vegetarian
TW: eating disorder, rape, suicide attempt, sexual assault, self harm, child abuse,
I can’t say enough good things about this book. It is a book of contrasts. Power and weakness, making your own decisions and having that taken away, living within society, and the consequences of leaving. I couldn’t put this book down while I was reading and the more bizarre it became, the more emotion it drummed up within me.
At a glance:
“Tale of power, obsession, and one woman's struggle to break free from the violence both without and within her.”
Dark and unsettling
The body, agency, and resistance
Conformity and breaking social norms
Summary:
“Before the nightmares began, Yeong-hye and her husband lived an ordinary, controlled life. But the dreams--invasive images of blood and brutality--torture her, driving Yeong-hye to purge her mind and renounce eating meat altogether. It's a small act of independence, but it interrupts her marriage and sets into motion an increasingly grotesque chain of events at home. As her husband, her brother-in-law and sister each fight to reassert their control, Yeong-hye obsessively defends the choice that's become sacred to her. Soon their attempts turn desperate, subjecting first her mind, and then her body, to ever more intrusive and perverse violations, sending Yeong-hye spiraling into a dangerous, bizarre estrangement, not only from those closest to her, but also from herself.”
Quotes:
“Why, is it such a bad thing to die?”
“The feeling that she had never really lived in this world caught her by surprise. It was a fact. She had never lived. Even as a child, as far back as she could remember, she had done nothing but endure.”
“This was the body of a beautiful young woman, conventionally an object of desire, and yet it was a body from which all desire had been eliminated. But this was nothing so crass as carnal desire, not for her—rather, or so it seemed, what she had renounced was the very life that her body represented.”
Human Acts
TW: Death, violence, torture, suicide, sexual violence, rape, alcoholism
From the first page, I knew I would never forget this book. Its words and pages are steeped in an unflinching resolve to stare violence and death in the face. We are taken through events following a horrible massacre, and trace “the harsh reality of oppression and the resounding, extraordinary poetry of humanity.”
Here is my review for Human Acts.
At a glance:
Exploration of suppression and its effects
Interconnected, multiple points of view
“Tracing the harsh reality of oppression and the resounding, extraordinary poetry of humanity.”
Historical events retold
Summary:
“In the midst of a violent student uprising in South Korea, a young boy named Dong-ho is shockingly killed.
The story of this tragic episode unfolds in a sequence of interconnected chapters as the victims and the bereaved encounter suppression, denial, and the echoing agony of the massacre. From Dong-ho's best friend who meets his own fateful end; to an editor struggling against censorship; to a prisoner and a factory worker, each suffering from traumatic memories; and to Dong-ho's own grief-stricken mother; and through their collective heartbreak and acts of hope is the tale of a brutalized people in search of a voice.”
Quotes:
“Is it true that human beings are fundamentally cruel? Is the experience of cruelty the only thing we share as a species? Is the dignity that we cling to nothing but self-delusion, masking from ourselves the single truth: that each one of us is capable of being reduced to an insect, a ravening beast, a lump of meat? To be degraded, slaughtered - is this the essential of humankind, one which history has confirmed as inevitable?”
“Some memories never heal. Rather than fading with the passage of time, those memories become the only things that are left behind when all else is abraded. The world darkens, like electric bulbs going out one by one. I am aware that I am not a safe person.”
“The day I stood shoulder to shoulder with hundreds of thousands of my fellow civilians, staring down the barrels of the soldiers' guns, the day the bodies of those first two slaughtered were placed in a handcart and pushed at the head of the column, I was startled to discover an absence in side myself: the absence of fear. I remember feeling that it was all right to die; I felt the blood of a hundred thousand hearts surging together into one enormous artery, fresh and clean...the sublime enormity of a single heart, pulsing blood through that vessel and into my own. I dared to feel a part of it.”
The White Book
TW: Child death, misscarriage, war, animal death, alcoholism, death of parent
This is a more subtle work from Kang but, I think, no less impressive or important. The White Book is filled with wandering vignettes that pack such a punch in their longing and love. It is poetry at its finest and the explorations it takes with its images and thoughts are worth so many rereads.
Here’s a homage to my reading journey with The White Book.
At a glance:
Poetic, transience
People may be fragmented but they are strong
“Our attempts to graft new life from the ashes of destruction.”
Exploration of grief, love, and family
Summary:
“While on a writer's residency, a nameless narrator wanders the twin white worlds of the blank page and snowy Warsaw. THE WHITE BOOK becomes a meditation on the color white, as well as a fictional journey inspired by an older sister who died in her mother's arms, a few hours old. The narrator grapples with the tragedy that has haunted her family, an event she colors in stark white--breast milk, swaddling bands, the baby's rice cake-colored skin--and, from here, visits all that glows in her memory: from a white dog to sugar cubes.”
Quotes:
“There are certain memories that remain inviolate to the ravages of time. And to those of suffering. It is not true that everything is colored by time and suffering. It is not true that they bring everything to ruin.”
“Looking at herself in the mirror, she never forgot that death was hovering behind that face. Faint yet tenacious, like black writing bleeding through thin paper.”
“Now and then she finds herself wondering, and not out of self-pity, but with a detached, almost idle curiosity: If you could add up all the pills she’d ever taken, what would the total be? How many hours of pain has she lived through? As though life itself wished to impede her progress, she was brought up short again and again. As though the force that prevents her moving forward to the light stands always at the ready inside her own body. All those hours when she had lost her way, in hesitation and in doubt. How many would there be? How many small white pills?”
Greek Lessons
TW: Animal death, ableism, domestic abuse, grief, self harm, violence, death of parent
I have not read this book yet. I’ve been waiting for the perfect time, I think, but can’t wait to dive into the pages.
At a glance:
Suffering, regrets, and attachment
Language and communication
The balancing act humanity attempts
Silence
Summary:
“In a classroom in Seoul, a young woman watches her Greek language teacher at the blackboard. She tries to speak but has lost her voice. Her teacher finds himself drawn to the silent woman, for day by day he is losing his sight.
Soon they discover a deeper pain binds them together. For her, in the space of just a few months, she has lost both her mother and the custody battle for her nine-year-old son. For him, it's the pain of growing up between Korea and Germany, being torn between two cultures and languages.”
Quotes:
“If snow is the silence that falls from the sky, perhaps rain is an endless sentence.”
“This voice, which we call the middle voice, expresses an action that relates to the subject reflexively.”
“And that I was finally, safely back in the folds of a culture where people aren't expected to exchange smiles or greetings with every passing stranger. I couldn't understand why this caused such a wrenching sense of solitude in me then.”
We Do Not Part
(Release date January 21, 2025)
At a glance:
“A disquietingly beautiful novel about the impossibility of waking up from the nightmare of history”
Korean history
Dreams and reality
Voices from the past
Summary:
“One morning in December, Kyungha receives a message from her friend Inseon saying she has been hospitalized in Seoul and asking that Kyungha join her urgently. The two women have last seen each other over a year before, on Jeju Island, where Inseon lives and where, two days before this reunion, she has injured herself chopping wood. Airlifted to Seoul for an operation, Inseon has had to leave behind her pet bird. Bedridden, she begs Kyungha to take the first plane to Jeju to save the animal.
A snowstorm hits the island when Kyungha arrives. She must reach Inseon’s house at all costs, but the icy wind and snow squalls slow her down as night begins to fall. She wonders if she will arrive in time to save Inseon's bird—or even survive the terrible cold that envelops her with every step. Lost in a world of snow, she doesn't yet suspect the vertiginous plunge into the darkness which awaits her at her friend's house. There, the long-buried story of Inseon's family surges into light, in dreams and memories passed from mother to daughter, and in the archive painstakingly assembled at the house, documenting a terrible massacre on the island.”
Quotes:
“Is it somehow incomplete, the parting? Is it deferred? The goodbye - or the closure? Indifintely?”
“People say 'light as snow'. But snow has its own heft, which is the weight of this drop of water. People say 'light as a bird'. But birds too have their weight.”
“I wanted to ask you – what if we did something about it together? I asked Inseon. What if you and I were to plant logs in a field, dress them in black ink and film them under falling snow?”
Kang said she would “like to have tea” to celebrate, “ I’m going to have tea with my son and I’ll celeKang ultimately declined to hold a press conference. Her father said, “Her perspective had shifted from that of a writer living in Korea to a more global one. She said that with the wars raging between Russia and Ukraine, Israel and Palestine, with deaths being reported every day, she could not hold a celebratory press conference. She asked for understanding in this matter."
This decision remains constant with the themes and events she writes in her books. Kang “upheld a human act of rectitude in the face of human barbarity.”
Instead, Kang leaves us with this, “I’m going to have tea with my son and I’ll celebrate it quietly tonight.”
Let’s join her and raise a glass.