Curious about 2024 literature 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 International Booker prize in 2016. It’s the story of a middle aged Korean woman who one night suddenly decides not to eat meat anymore. The vegetarian herself is silent in the novel, her story is instead told in three different narratives by her husband, her brother-in-law and her older sister (in that order). Their different reactions, from abhorrence to sexual fascination to poisonous envy, stand in sharp contrast to the woman’s own mute refusal to back down or to admit to any guilt for the shame she has brought to her family. Through these responses we get a sharp portrait of a patriarchal society obsessed by careerism and rigid sometimes tyrannical social norms and conventions.

Greek Lessons

This short but intense and psychologically penetrating novel is an intimate portrait of two individuals who have lost, or are in of the process of losing, the most vital links that connects them to the exterior world. After having suffered domestic abuse the female protagonist has retreated into muteness, while the male protagonist slowly is losing his sight due to a hereditary disease. In order to regain an ability to communicate the woman is taking courses in Ancient Greek – since a language not longer spoken will not be able to hurt her – while the man losing his sight is her Greek teacher. A delicate love story of sorts, the novel traces their attempt to if not to overcome so at least try to find common ground in their shared bereavement. It’s also a book about language, how words can help us give shape and meaning to our outer and inner world but also tear at and destroy what is most delicate in all of us: our identity.

Human Acts

As in her latest novel, We Do Not Part, scheduled for publication in English in January 2025, Human Acts takes an oblique, but terrifying and totally convincing look at her country’s not so distant past. Through many different ever shifting perspectives, which create an almost unbearable narrative suspense, the novel chronicles the lives of many people either taking part, or as victims innocently being caught up in a student uprising in May 1980 in the town of Gwangju, where the author spent her childhood and early youth, an uprising that was brutally crushed by the then ruling military junta. As in many other of her works, the border between perpetrator and victim, body and soul, or even between living and dead, is fluctuating, which is reflected in a language both straight-forward and subtle. Han gives in this and several other novels a new meaning to the expression “living with the past”, considered as remnants of a reality that you can neither shy away from nor resist. Through her honest and truly awe-inspiring literary works we live and relive our pasts continuously.

First published October 2024