To discover Han Kang, 2024 Nobel Prize for Literature, “The Vegetarian” is the novel you need

BOOK – And the winner is : Han Kang. This Thursday, October 10, the 53-year-old South Korean writer was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature for the year 2024 by the jury of the Swedish Academy, which thus salutes “ his intense poetic prose that confronts historical trauma and exposes the fragility of human life ».

Unknown to French readers until the 2010s – a period when it began to be translated here, the author has around ten works to her credit, oscillating between essays, poetry, short stories and novels. And almost as many awards already, including the Foreign Medici Prize in 2023, for Impossible goodbyes.

Text ” of great strength “, according to The Worldthis poignant story of a woman facing the memories of civilians massacred in her country was published more than 15 years after the release of the book which truly made her breakthrough in the eyes of the world: The Vegetarian, a novel written by hand and in difficult conditions, its articulation problems having appeared at that time.

Divided into three parts, the story is that of a certain Yŏnghye, a relatively ordinary character who, after a strange nightmare, decides to ban all animal food from her life. Quickly, consequences are felt. She loses weight, no longer wants to make love to her husband. The reason? He stinks of meat. In her entourage, no one recognizes her anymore. She herself gets lost, opens her veins, leading to violent hospitalization.

The Vegetarian at the cinema

The rest of the book, perhaps you know it if you are a connoisseur of South Korean films. Two years after its publication, The Vegetarian was exported to the cinema in a feature film of the same name, directed by Lim Woo-Seong with actress Chae Min-seo in the lead role. In the official selection at Sundance in the United States, it also stood out at the Busan International Film Festival in 2009.

In France, we had to wait until 2015 to see the book arrive in bookstores. We owe it to the editions of Le Serpent à plumes, even if it could have happened earlier. “ I had acquired the rights to ‘The Vegetarian’ before giving up, with a torn heart, because of the translation which did not suit me”, tell the Monde the one to whom we owe the first French translations of Han Kang, Laure Leroy of Zulma editions.

His refusal to publish the book remains to this day ” one of his biggest regrets “. This is understandable: The Vegetarian won the International Booker Prize in 2016, the most coveted award for all non-English-speaking writers. Since then, the novel has been translated into 30 languages ​​and has sold several hundred thousand copies, including no less than 160,000 in the United Kingdom alone after the award ceremony. And how much after the Nobel?

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