What to read: Han Kang

Curious about 2024 literary laureate Han Kang, but unsure which of her books to pick up first? Here Steve Sem-Sandberg from the Swedish Academy gives his recommendations.

The vegetarian

The vegetarian is Han Kang’s international breakthrough novel, which won the 2016 International Booker Prize. It’s the story of a middle-aged Korean woman who suddenly decides one night to stop eating meat. The vegetarian herself is silent in the novel, her story is instead told in three different stories by her husband, her brother-in-law and her older sister (in that order). Her varied reactions, from disgust to sexual fascination to poisonous envy, contrast sharply with the woman’s silent refusal to give in or accept guilt for the shame she has brought upon her family. Through these answers we get a stark picture of a patriarchal society obsessed with careerism and rigid, sometimes tyrannical social norms and conventions.

Greek lessons

This short but intense and psychologically profound novel is an intimate portrait of two people who have lost, or are in the process of losing, the most important connections that connect them to the outside world. After domestic violence, the female protagonist becomes mute, while the male protagonist slowly loses his sight due to a hereditary disease. In order to regain her ability to communicate, the woman takes courses in ancient Greek – because a language she no longer speaks cannot harm her – while the man, who is losing his sight, is her Greek teacher. The novel is a delicate love story of sorts, tracing their attempt, if not to overcome, then at least to try to find common ground in their shared bereavement. It is also a book about language, how words can help us give shape and meaning to our external and internal worlds, but also the tearing and destruction of what is most fragile in all of us: our identities.

Human actions

Like in her latest novel We’re not breaking upRelease in English planned for January 2025, Human actions takes a strange but frightening and utterly convincing look at her country’s not-so-distant past. Through many different, ever-changing perspectives that create an almost unbearable narrative tension, the novel depicts the lives of many people who either took part in a student uprising in May 1980 in the city of Gwangju, where the author lives, or were innocent victims while spending their time Childhood and early adolescence with an uprising that was brutally suppressed by the then ruling military junta. As in many of her other works, the boundary between perpetrator and victim, body and soul or between living and dead fluctuates, which is reflected in a language that is as straightforward as it is subtle. In this and several other novels, Han gives new meaning to the phrase “living with the past,” seen as a remnant of a reality from which one cannot shy away or resist. Through their honest and truly impressive literary works, we live and relive our past again and again.

First published in October 2024

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MLA Style: What to Read: Han Kang. NobelPrize.org. Nobel Prize Outreach AB 2024. Sat. Oct. 12, 2024.