The Vegetarian by Han Kang (2015, translated from the Korean by Deborah Smith , first published 2007)

The Vegetarian by Han Kang wins the 2016 International Booker Prize Award

       Translator Debra Smith.                                      Han Kang

" there is the kind of seriousness whose trademark is anguish, cruelty, derangement. Here we do accept a disparity between intention and result. I am speaking, obviously, of a style of personal existence as well as of a style in art; but the examples had best come from art. Think of Bosch, Sade, Rimbaud, Jarry, Kafka, Artaud, think of most of the important works of art of the 20th century" from Notes on Camp by Susan Sontag

The Vegetarian by Han Kang is a shockingly, violent,  deeply disturbing account of tne events that ensue when the very normal unremarkable wife of an average Korean corporate employees, against all cultural norms, has a dream which causes her to become a vegetarian.  The work has received very well deserved highly laudatory reviews in major publications. .  I will at once say I think Han Kang is an important new writer for those of us in the Anglophone literary world.  As i read the finely crafted beautifully translated work I was brought to mind Susan Sontag's discussion of a sensibility she called "The Literature of Cruelty".  (Her examples are above, in the 21st century I think we can add Roberto Bolano's 2666). I want here to reflect a bit on the place this set in modern Seoul work has among the European pre World War II classics mentioned by Sontag.

The Vegetarian has three sections.  In the opening segment we meet Yeong-Kye and her husband.  The story takes place in a society which values conformity, where one gets along by going along.  Then the couple's life is totally transformed when the wife has a dream which she sees as a message directing her to become a vegetarian.  The dream sequences are very striking, hard to understand and opened ended, as a dream piece should be.  I see the dream as opening the wife to the vision of her world built on murder, cruelty, purification and a thinly disguised Hobbesian struggle for dominance.  By eating meat she is somehow signifying her acquiescence  in these horrors, as if she were an accomplice to a crime, preventing her from speaking out.  The wife begins to lose weight, her husband tries to tell her humans require meat, it is necessary for survival.  In one horrific very vivid scene the husband is invited for the first time to have dinner at a banquet for top employees at his corporation, potentially a big career move up  for him.  The huge problem is the numerous courses of meats, exquisitely prepared that will be served.  If his wife will not eat, she will be seen as insulting her hosts.  This section of the novel has a horrific close.  It is as though the wife cannot bear the inherent cruelty that is the seeming price of society.  She is driven mad by this or uses madness to hide from a reality she is not equipped to articulate. 

The second segment is centered on the brother in law of Yeong-Hye, married to her sister.  He is an artist who has developed a sexual fixation on his sister in law centering on a birthmark.  He imagines her body and convinces her to allow him to paint her nude, not as depicting her but with her as the canvas.  I am not sure I understand how this as triggered by her conversion to vegetarianism or my placing the story in the literature of cruelty but I am sure it is all tied in.  

Yeong's parents and her sister are all very worried about her.  They see her refusal to eat meat as a repudiation of their way of life, of their family history and symptomatic of a potentially suicidal  breakdown.  Section three's most exciting segment is a family reunion dinner.  The father of the sisters is very upset over his daughter's refusal to eat meat.  Something very brutal and cruel is done to Yeong in an effort to return her to carivoire status.  

I don't want to tell a lot of the plot of this work.  It, to me, can be read as an indictment of a society built on death, on the murder of the natural world from which humans arose.  Yeong is not at all an intellectual who has derived her position from reflections.  She herself cannot really understand why she can no longer eat meat.  She retreats into madness as her only escape.  

The Vegetarian is a deeply disturbing work.  It is compulsive reading.  It can, I think, also be seen as a work about the nature of families, about conformist pressures, and deeper down into atavistic roots suggesting to be human, to live, is to murder.  It can be seen as dealing with the impact of life in a huge incredibly crowded hive life city in a very consumer status driven society built on all following social norms. 

The Vegetarian will stay with you for a long time.  

I strongly endorse this book and hope to read more of her translated works. 

Han Kang was born in Gwangju, South Korea, and moved to Seoul at the age of ten. She studied Korean literature at Yonsei University. Her writing has won the Yi Sang Literary Prize, the Today's Young Artist Award, and the Korean Literature Novel Award. The Vegetarian, her first novel to be translated into English, was published by Portobello Books in 2015, and her second novel to be translated into English, Human Acts, will be published by Portobello in 2016. She currently teaches creative writing at the Seoul Institute of the Arts.  - from the publisher's webpage.

Portobello Books is one of the leading publishers of works in translation, important nonfiction, debut works by promising writers as well as  books by leading contemporary authors, including Nobel and Booker Prize Winners.   In just a few minutes on their very well done webpage I added numerous works to my "to be read" list.   

Mel u

Human Acts by Han Kang. (2014, translated from Korean by Deborah Smith, 2015)

"At that moment I realised what all this was for. The words that this torture and starvation were intended to elicit. We will make you realise how ridiculous it was, the lot of you waving the national flag... We will prove to you that you are nothing but filthy stinking bodies..."   From Human Acts by Han Kang

A fascinating article on the challenges she encountered in rendering Human Acts from Korean to English by the translator Deborah Smith,

The-Gwangju-Massacre-1980. Good historical background information

Immediately after finishing The Vegetarian by Han Kang I knew I wanted to read all of her translated works. The Vegetarian is a very powerful, at times viscerally disturbing, account of what happens when, contrary to all social norms, a Korean housewife follows the dictates of a dream and becomes a vegetarian.  To me seeking out more works by an author one had not even heard about until just prior to your initial reading is one of the sincerest affirmations of their work a reader can offer.  I was very glad to find on the webpage of Portobello Books  that the very elegant translator of The Vegetarian, Deborah Smith, now has translated  a second work by Kang, Human Acts. ( I think anyone interested in the process of translation will find the article I linked to just below the cover image very interesting. Translating between languages with no common roots presents more of a challenge than languages rooted in Latin structures.) 

As Deborah Smith tells us in her very informative introduction in 1980 South Korea citizens in Gwangju began large scale protests when the dictatorial ruler of the country shut down the universities and curtailed public meetings and what little free speech there was.  As demonstrations expanded the government took violent means to restore order.  Police squads fired into crowds, there are even reports of flame throwers being used on crowds of students.  It is estimated that about 2000 citizens were killed. There were also many arrbritrary arrests and torture was common place. (The article I linked to above on the riots is very useful)

Human Acts is structured so that the reading experience mirrors the chaos, depth of pain and attempt to cope with incredible cruelty by authorities that took place in the lives and soul of the victims of government reprisal on the rioters.  It is not a linear account of the history of the riots but gives us a deeper contact with modern  Korean  history than a traditional non-modernistic novel would.  

I find it not easy to relay the power of this work.  I will briefly talk about some of the episodic narrative segments of Human Acts and how I see them in the context of her other novel I have read, The Vegetarian, post World War Two South East Asian history.  

The opening segment deals with a fifteen year old boy who has been assigned the duty of watching over the bodies in a temporary morgue set up in a school gymnasium.  In a culture with very old traditions of revering the dead through ancient rituals, the bodies of the riot victims are treated like garbage by the soldiers and police.  In one blood chilling sequence two Korean Army men talk as if it were nothing about how they could follow the example of the Khmer Rouge leaders in nearby Cambodia who killed two million of their own people.  We are forced to wonder what turns people from the same culture as produced the protestors into such monsters.  Human Acts is set in Korea in the 1980s but it reverberated through all of human history for me.  The boy is looking for the body of a friend.  From here the novel goes on to focus on the lifetime impsct the riots had on a diverse group of participants, including the author who was there.  

In a fascinsting segment we enter the consciousness of the soul of a man killed in the riots as he looks at tne brutalized remains of others killed in the riots.  

We see the impact the riots have had on the psyche, in a very interesting case, of an editor, we have flashed forward thirty five years, who is working on a book on the riots.  We see how the government censors even then would not allow the truth to be told about the riots.  I was very impacted when the long term impact of torture was compared to the lingering impact of the atomic bomb on innocent victims in World War Two.  I do not want to tell to much about the narrative so first time readers can experience the book on their own. 

I have only just touched on the themes and power of this work. Kang has masterfully employed the techniques of literary modernism and magic realism to tell this terrible tale.  I think, and this ties in with my remarks on The Vegetarian that we are being forced to look at and reflect on things we push way back in our consciousness which society and those in power and their enforcers remove from our primary field of vision.  

Human Acts is about the attempt by modern power structures to destroy very old almost atavistic belief structures.  It is about how the common people are ruled through division, how how an uneducated young boy is given a rifle and a uniform and a flag to wave and comes to think it is his duty to kill other young people.  It is about hiding from and in the deep dark. It is also about the long term deformative  impact of colonialism. 

I would suggest you first read The Vegetarian then the more challengingly rendered Human Acts. Both are fascinating compulsively reads.  For Anglophone readers, these works should be your introduction to modern Korean literature.  

Han Kang was born in Gwangju, South Korea, and moved to Seoul at the age of ten. She studied Korean literature at Yonsei University. Her writing has won the Yi Sang Literary Prize, the Today's Young Artist Award, and the Korean Literature Novel Award. The Vegetarian, her first novel to be translated into English, was published by Portobello Books in 2015, and her second novel to be translated into English, Human Acts, will be published by Portobello in 2016. She currently teaches creative writing at the Seoul Institute of the Arts.  - from the publisher's webpage.

Portobello Books is one of the leading publishers of works in translation, important nonfiction, debut works by promising writers as well as  books by leading contemporary authors, including Nobel and Booker Prize Winners.   In just a few minutes on their very well done webpage I added numerous works to my "to be read" list.  

Deborah Smith is a literary translator from the Korean. Her translations include two novels by Han Kang, The Vegetarian and Human Acts (both Portobello, UK; Crown, US), and two by Bae Suah, A Greater Music (Open Letter, 2016) and Recitation (Deep Vellum, 2016). She recently founded Tilted Axis Press, a not-for-profit press focusing on contemporary literary fiction. Tilted Axis's first titles will include a darkly erotic Bengali novella, an obliquely allegorical take on South Korea's social minorities, and a feminist, environmentalist narrative poem from Indonesia, published as a 'sight-impaired-accessible' art book. These will be followed by translations from Thai, Uzbek, and Japanese. She tweets as @londonkoreanist.

I hope more translations of the work of Han Kang are in the works, hopefully in the elegant prose of Deborah Smith.

Mel u

The Square by Choi In-Hun (1960 in Korean, to be published in translation 2014 by Kim Seong-Kon)

The Square by Choi In-Hun (born in North Korea in 1936, moved with family to South Korea in 1950) is an award winning work of Korean Modernism.  Dalkey Archives Press has recently begun publishing translations of highly regarded post World War I I Korean novels and short stories.  They have kindly given me review copies of a number of them, including The Square.

The Square focuses on a young man, Lee Myong-Jun whose life reflects the divisions in Korean society.  He struggles to decide if North Korea with its Marxist society and militant nationalism represents what is best for Koreans or if the capitalistic industrial Western looking South Korea is the right path.  When the Korean War  (1950 to 1953) starts Lee joins the North Korean Army and ends up being taken prisoner.  After the war he is released and decides to leave Korea, not being able to decide which side is in the right, for India.  I was delighted to see the ship was called "The Tagore".  The story is told through a series of somewhat fragmented interior monologues while he crosses  the Indian Ocean.  

I enjoyed my first venture into Korean modernism and will endeavor to read more works this year.

I offer my thanks to Dalkey Archives (dalkeyarchives.com) for a generous gift of books.  They publish lots of great books and have a very multicultural catalogue.

"The Salary Man" by Krys Lee (from Drifting House, 2012)

Krys Lee is a new to be writer that I am thrilled to have found.   Most of her stories focus on residents of North or South Korea or immigrants to the USA.   The stories I have so far posted on deal with the mind numbing hardship of life in North Korea and the struggles to survive of those in the South or in the USA.    Older immigrants stay totally in the boundaries of Korean communities.  

"The Salary Man" shows in a painfully real and vivid fashion what happened to 1000s of people who thought they had life time employment locked in when the South Korean economy collapsed in the mid  1990s.   At one time if you got a job at a major Korean corporation you were almost guaranteed life time employment.   Managers were revered, at least to their face, and corporations were paternalistic.  In bailing out the Korean economy, the International Monetary Fund put such strict requirements on the government that businesses were forced to lay off large numbers of workers.  Many workers, including the central figure in this story was so shamed they waited long periods before telling their families, often getting dressed for work and then sitting in the park all day.  We witness the terrible decline and hardship of the salary man.  He sends his wife and kids to live with her parents, saying once he is back working he will set up a home for them again.    His life becomes worse and worse every day.  Soon he is among many 1000s of homeless ex-salary men.  His wife divorces him.  He learns to survive on the street though his mental state degenerates sadly. ,

I hope to read a lot more of the work of Krys Lee.  

Krys Lee was born in Seoul in The Republic of Korea and raised in England and the United States.  Her debut collection of short storiesDrifting House (2012) is drawing great praise from all over the world, with the exception of North Korea where I suspect being caught with a copy would get you in very serious trouble

"At The Edge of The World by Krys Lee (from Drifting House).

"At The Edge of The World" is the third short story by Krys Lee on which I have posted.  Her stories are perfectly structured works of art, beautifully written, incredibly insightful as regards her characters and a joy to read.  Most of her stories are about life in North Korea or about Korean immigrants to America.

There are three central characters in the story.   A married couple and their ten year old son.   At sixteen the mother, while living in North Korea, had been sold to a Chinese man who got her pregnant,  she met her husband while walking across China to gain entrance to a special refugee program for the USA.

When we meet them they are in Los Angeles.   There son is a super achiever in school, at ten he is already determined to go to medical school.   Most in the Korean community have become devout Christians.  In one very telling line we learn the husband is an atheist, he got enough of region when he was forced to treat the Korean dictator as God. The parents drift apart, the boy has his first crush.

The beauty in this wonderful story is in the amazing details.  I loved the subplot involving the Korean shaman who moved in next door.

I endorse this story to all lovers of the form.  

Krys Lee was born in Seoul in The Republic of Korea and raised in England and the United States.  Her debut collection of short storiesDrifting House (2012) is drawing great praise from all over the world, with the exception of North Korea where I suspect being caught with a copy would get you in very serious trouble

"Girl On a Leash" by Krys Lee (2013, 5 pages)

Krys Lee was born in Seoul in The Republic of Korea and raised in England and the United States.  Her debut collection of short stories Drifting  House (2012) is drawing great praise from all over the world, with the exception of North Korea where I suspect being caught with a copy would get you in very serious trouble..  

I posted last year on the title story in her collection, "Drifting Home".   I was very happy to find a new story by Lee in a recent issue of Guernica.  Lee focuses on Koreans.   Some of her stories are about life in North Korea, some in Seoul, and some deal with first and second generation Korean immigrants to the USA.  

"Girl on a Leash" has three main characters, a married couple.  The father mops the floors at an American college at night.  He graduated from the University of Seoul, he resents the barbarians, as he and his wife call Americans.  They save to open a laundry. 

They also have a late teenage daughter. They keep her,not sure if we are to take this literarily or metaphorically, on a leash.

"She had always been latched to a leash. Had grown up with a handsome pink leather collar encircling her neck, a leather strap holding her at rigid attention. Everywhere she walked, her father and mother trailed behind, slackening or tightening it.

They worried. If she fell asleep, the downbeat of the leash shuddered her alert. When she was slow, her father snapped it against her clavicle. But when shadows scudded along the lintels, they drew the leash in and harbored her in the cove of their arms."

There biggest fear is that American college boys will sexually prey on their developing into a beauty daughter.   They fear her sexuality will be her downfall.  They repeatedly warn her to trust no American men.  They constantly search her room for signs of trouble.  When they find love letters, they tighten the leash so if she resists she will fall over.

This kind of parental tyranny often leads to trouble and can produce the very results parents fear.

This is a very powerful story.  I recommend it to all.   It is an excellent introduction to what most may find a wonderful new writer.

Mel u

Read "Girl On a Leash" here

"Drifting House" by Krys Lee Project 196 Korea

"Drifting House" by Krys Lee   (2012, 21 pages)

Project 196

The Republic of Korea

4 of 196 Countries

My Introductory Post on Project 196

1. Georgia 
2. Canada
3. U. S. A.
4. The Republic of Korea

 "The younger brother Choecheol ran ahead. Like a child, Woncheol thought, frowning, though he too was still a child, an eleven-year-old with a body withering on two years of boiled tree bark, mashed roots, the occasional grilled rat and fried crickets on a stick. He picked across the public square, afraid to step where last month, the town had watched two men dragged in necklaces of bones and then hung for cannibalizing their parents. They passed a vendor and woman haggling as if on the frontier of madness. On the straw mat between them one frozen flank of beef? Pork? Or human? No one knew any more, though they pretended to."

If you are an author and want to represent your country, please contact me.  If you want to do a guest post on your favorite story for the feature please contact me also.

If you are a publisher that has an anthology that is done in the 196 spirit, please contact me as I will be spotlighting appropriate collections.  

At first I thought I was setting myself an impossible task but a bit of research has made me optimistic  that I can find a short story from all 196 countries in the world.   I feel this part of the project will be completed.

I also want, and maybe this is crazy, to publish a short story, over the next 196 weeks from a writer in each 196 countries.  

As I reflected on my project and all the hate and conflicts among the countries of the world I wondered who were the haters.   Somehow I do not imagine Russian readers of Ernest Hemingway or American lovers of Chekhov among those who hate people just because they seem a bit different.

Krys Lee was born in Seoul in The Republic of Korea and raised in England and the United States.  Her debut collection of short stories Drifting House (2012) is drawing great praise from all over the world, with the exception of North Korea where I suspect being caught with a copy would get you in very serious trouble..  Today I will post on the title story in the collection.  I choose this story as it brings to life the horror of life in contemporary North Korea as seen through the eyes of children who see no fault in how their society is run.

Life is so bad in North Korea that people dream of escaping into China and see it as a paradise.  This  alone is shocking to older people from Europe or the USA as they imagine China a place one escapes from, not to.  

The plot action is about a family of siblings leaving their home to find their mother, who they think may  have left for China.   As the children go through the countryside things comfortable people would think are horrible seem wonderful and beautiful to them.   There is so much pain compressed in some of the lines in this amazing story that it was almost hard to read.   It takes a great writer to writer so beautifully about something so ugly.

"The acorn’s meat, wrinkled and gray. The size of a rat’s brain. He broke it into nearly perfect thirds, and into her waiting, open mouth fed Gukhwa the largest chunk. His hands were shaking. It was good, without insects."

The government had completely stopped food rations in their village, as a lesson of some kind.  The children deeply revere the countries leader, they have never heard anything but worship of his greatness.  All of the troubles of the country are blamed on America.  

" But Woncheol believed they would find her, the way he believed in the sky and the snow, the American imperialists that the Dear Leader said were starving the country out of existence."

Here is a song they learned while being taught the basics of math

"He sang, ‘One dead American plus one dead American equals two dead Americans"

The North Korea countryside is full of very young soldiers who will shoot any citizen traveling without pass or one who attempts to steal food. 

"Drifting House" is an amazing very disturbing story.  I know this is the cliche of all times, but it made me be very happy for what I have and feel ashamed of myself for being annoyed because there was not enough dressing on my salad yesterday.  

You can read the story here and I strongly urge all lovers of the short story to do so.  I think Krys Lee might one day be one of the great short story writers of all time.  

You can learn more about her and her work on her webpage.

I hope to read her entire collection in 2013.

Author Bio

Krys Lee was born in Seoul, South Korea, raised in California and Washington, and studied in the United States and England. She was a finalist for Best New American Voices, received a special mention in the 2012 Pushcart Prize XXXVI, and her work has appeared in the Kenyon Review, Narrative magazine, Granta (New Voices), California Quarterly, Asia Weekly, the Guardian, the New Statesman, and Conde Nast Traveller, UK (forthcoming). She lives in Seoul with intervals in San Francisco.


Mel u