South Korea is something epic, enduring the pull of its dictatorial neighbor to the north from one end of the peninsula that makes it dependent to access the rest of the Asian continent by land. Without a doubt, this is how the character of a narrator is forged as Han kang; from a sensation of continuous exceptionality, loaded with certain misgivings and still longing for that life that ultimately is literature.
But location aside, Kang's novelistic facet is presented to us with an emphaticness that transcends borders, trends or any other corseted. Because its variability deals with everything with a pan-literary intention, from socio-political aspects to a humanistic one that takes away the anecdotal from the bottom, pouring out in spurts.
Straddling the story and the novel, its stories are woven together with that notion of emphaticness in each scene. As if each chapter could be a story in itself. But at the same time, as a sum of atoms that at the time make up a chain, mosaic, tapestry and relief of life with its edges and its areas of friendliest touch. A sensory literature ...
Han Kang's Top 3 Recommended Novels
The vegetarian
Kang's work par excellence, a surprising and magnetically strident viewing from many different sources. Unfolds that follow one another with a certain surreal aspect but absolutely loaded with transcendence from the everyday.
The vegetarian tells the story of an ordinary woman, Yeonghye, who by the simple decision not to eat meat again turns a normal life into a disturbing nightmare. Narrated in three voices, The vegetarian it tells of the progressive detachment from the human condition of a woman who has decided to stop being what she is forced to be. The reader, like another relative, attends astonished this subversive act that will fracture the protagonist's family life and transform all her daily relationships into a vortex of violence, shame and desire.
Human acts
Ultimately, reading aa Kang is also getting closer to the recent history of South Korea. Because just as Germany was reunited in the throes of the cold war, the two Koreas are already like irreconcilable sisters of becoming antagonistic today.
In May 1980, in the city of Gwangju, the army put down a popular uprising, causing thousands of deaths. Human acts relive those terrible events through the experiences of seven different characters: torture, fear, the anguish of not finding the missing, the duel, the survivor's guilt, the nightmares, the wounds, the aftermath, the reunions … And the memory of the dead, their voice and their light.
Blanco
It may be that the well-known evil of the blank sheet is due to the sensation of nothingness that is born from that color opposite to darkness but as empty as the worst black. Because there is all the light in the world, the sum of all the colors and yet there is nothing. Hence, the paradoxical impact raises various interpretations of this color depending on the place in the world from which it is observed ...
Starting from the seemingly banal wording of a to-do list, Han Kang does a poignant exercise in introspection, searching for the epicenter of his existential pain. In some oriental cultures white is the color of mourning. Perhaps the white things that surround us preserve our pain, contain an anguish that we do not know how to see at first glance. Kang delves into a delicate literary inquiry and seeks, through the description of everyday things, the evil that he has always felt due to the absence of a sister whom he did not know.
Other Recommended Han Kang Books
the greek class
Salvation is a dead language that almost no one can speak anymore, but where the roots of everything are found, the etymology of the ultimate existence that can be drawn from the abyss of despair.
In Seoul, a woman attends ancient Greek classes. Her teacher asks her to read aloud but she remains silent; she has lost the ability to speak, as well as her mother and custody of an eight-year-old son. Her only hope of regaining her speech is by learning a dead language.
The professor, who has just returned to Korea after spending half his life in Germany, finds himself torn between two cultures and two languages. He, too, faces losses: his eyesight irreversibly worsens with each passing day, and he lives with the fear of knowing that , when total blindness arrives, he will lose all autonomy.
With unusual beauty, the intimate voices of these two protagonists intertwine and intersect in a moment of despair. Is it possible that they find in the other the way to save themselves, that darkness give way to light and silence to the word?
The acclaimed author of The Vegetarian delves into loss, violence, and the fragile relationship of our senses with the world to offer us a love letter to philosophy, literature, and language, but, above all, to the essence of connection. human and what it means to feel alive.
I have come across this blog, and the truth is, my congratulations for its content, as well as thank you for the literary recommendations.
South Korea is discovering itself lately thanks to talents like Kang's, but not only in literature, but also in music. For example, the young South Korean composer Jun Jaeil, author of the OST of the series "The Squid Game", which has become the most watched worldwide, to date, and of the acclaimed film by the criticism, "Parasites."