Regarding Korean writers, we were waiting for Hwang Sok-yong, the wonderful storyteller of Old Garden (Zulma, 2005). Or even the poet Ko Un, often considered worthy of the Nobel Prize. It is towards South Korea that the Nobel jurors turned this year, but they chose to reward a woman, the novelist and poet Han Kang who at the age of 53 became the first winner of this prize in her country. In doing so, the Swedish Academy distinguishes a powerful work characterized in its words by “a double exposure of pain, a correspondence between mental torment and physical torment closely linked to Eastern thought”.
In 2023, we met Han Kang on the occasion of the French release of his novel Impossible goodbyes (Grasset). We had discovered a fine and precise novelist, like her books, whose poetry willingly plunges into the fantastic, but complex enough to conceal, beneath her praise of dreams and imagination, an implacable depiction of cruelty. human. The torment, the pain and the indelible traces of men’s violence were present in the interview, from the first sentences.
Read also: Article reserved for our subscribers “Impossible Goodbyes”: Han Kang between magical vision and historical nightmare
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“I have always been curious about human nature since I was a child, she confided to us. Maybe because she hurt me. You know, it’s like when you have a sore spot on your body and you can’t stop touching it, scratching it, or just thinking about it. »
It must be said that barbarism entered Han Kang’s life early on. Daughter of the writer Han Seung-won, little Kang was born in Gwangju, in the south of the country, on November 27, 1970. She was 9 years old when her family moved to Seoul, where she later studied literature, Yonsei University. This move took place exactly four months before the so-called Gwangju Uprising (May 1980), a peaceful mobilization led by the student and trade union movement for democracy, in protest against the ruling military junta. This revolt provoked from the army a response of such ferocity that it remains today synonymous with terror and bloodshed.
Bodies cut with bayonets
The massacre, which also constitutes the backdrop of the Old GardenHan Kang tells it in The one who returns (The Feathered Serpent, 2016). The little girl discovered these events at the age of 12 when she came across a hidden book at home. The photos of mutilated faces, bayoneted bodies, and her bloodied hometown left an indelible mark on her. “Since then, I have always tried, she saidto confront myself with this contradictory force which pushes beings sometimes to throw themselves onto a railway track to save a child, sometimes to murder their fellow human beings by the thousands. No matter what book I write, this violence comes out. »
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