On November 22, 2018, Han Kang met me at Goyo, a small and discreet bookstore in Seoul specializing in poetry. As soon as I met her, I understood that that architecture full of books was a mirror of the Korean writer, a delicate and sober person, a little shy, who usually dresses in dark tones and does not use makeup. In precise and slow English, we talked about La vegetariana, the shocking novel that the Rata publishing house had published in Spanish and Catalan the previous year. The original version appeared in Korean in 2007, but it was the English translation that won the Booker International Prize in 2016 that boosted its international exposure.
That morning, accompanied by the writer and filmmaker Lourdes Iglesias, we chatted about that novel and her vegetarian experience, which she had to interrupt because she got sick and the doctor told her that she had to eat red meat; but also about his poetry and his stories, which he had just compiled in three volumes; his humble origins in a house with severe shortages but full of books, because his father is also a writer; and about the monstrous city of Seoul, where he nevertheless wanted to continue living, “because Korea is the landscape of my literature.”
I was lucky enough to continue the conversation in Barcelona, because the CCCB invited her to give a talk on March 24 of the following year and I was her interlocutor. There I asked him again about reading in his childhood and he told us that he had to change schools five times, with the consequent absence of friends in each new center, so that books were always his comfort and his refuge. We also talked about the strangeness of living in a broken country, divided between the South and the North, with the constant threat of a possible war. And his interventions in the field of performance and contemporary art. He read fragments of Human Acts in Korean and I did it in Spanish. In the video of the event you can see that, although her fiction is serious, sometimes even sad, she is ironic and tends to have short laughs.
The writer Han Kang, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature
Roberto Ricciuti / Getty
His sensitivity to connecting ancient themes (machismo, identity, the body, collective traumas) with current issues (food, feminism, body art, conscientious objection, the representation of historical memory, cross-cultural challenges) It is the key to the exponential multiplication of its readers around the world. With serenity and intelligence, he knows how to turn big questions into characters and scenes of the 21st century. Embody them. Place them. Consider them.
Our third and last meeting to date was a little over a year ago in the Ateneu Barcelona café. At the end of a very animated talk, I told him that I had co-written a book with GPT-2 and GPT-3 and his expression suddenly changed. It became funereal. He felt it like a betrayal of literature. I explained my arguments to him and he promised to keep thinking about it.
After a few weeks, by email, she thanked me for the discussion, said that it had been very interesting for her, that we are in an early phase of artificial intelligence and that it is worth thinking about. Then I remembered something he said in an interview: “Asking questions, that’s what writing is for me. I don’t write answers, I simply strive to round off the questions, I try to stay within them for a long time.” Indeed, she is a writer who lives in the territory of questions.
That same day in 2019, a representative of the Future Library of Norway had traveled to Barcelona to talk about his participation in the artist Katie Paterson’s project, which consists of relating the 100 trees in a forest with 100 manuscripts that will remain unpublished until 2114 at the Deichman Library in Oslo. In 2014, when the work began, the designated author was Margaret Atwood, who delivered her text the following year. Han Kang did it in 2019. He became part of a canon of the most prominent writers of this century. Five years later, in the neighboring country, the Nobel Foundation has also stressed its importance.
I can imagine her overwhelmed, consumed by nerves, in her apartment in monstrous yet beloved Seoul. Maybe happy, probably upset because for the next few months she won’t be able to write calmly.
