The Vegetarian. By Han Kang. Translated by Deborah Smith. Hogarth; 192 pages; $21. Portobello; £7.99.
ONE of the most erotic literary novels of the season is a slim South Korean work about a woman who forsakes eating meat. On May 16th “The Vegetarian” by Han Kang won the 2016 Man Booker International Prize (MBIP) for fiction after a fiercely contested final judges’ meeting that pitched books from Angola, Austria, China, Italy and Turkey, as well as South Korea. Translated by Deborah Smith, a young English scholar who began learning Korean only seven years ago, “The Vegetarian” has been praised on both sides of the Atlantic as strange, visionary and transgressive.
Written in three parts, each with a different narrator, the book begins
quite plainly. “Before my wife turned vegetarian, I’d always thought of
her as completely unremarkable in every way.” This subversive act, inspired
by a dream, fractures the family life of the heroine, Yeong-hye. Her rebellion
takes on increasingly bizarre and frightening forms. Seemingly ordinary
relationships turn into a maelstrom of violence, shame and desire.
At the awards dinner at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, Boyd Tonkin, chairman of the 2016 MBIP judges, said: “In a style both lyrical and lacerating, [the story] reveals the impact of this great refusal both on the heroine herself and on those around her.” As Yeong-hye’s father tries to force-feed her and her husband divorces her, the novella veers from domestic drama to artistic parable and on, in a long, drawn-out silent scream, to a meditation on literally becoming a tree. “I wanted to describe a woman who desperately didn’t want to belong to the human race,” Ms Kang said afterwards. “Humans commit such violence.”
After the Booker Prize Foundation changed the rules in 2013 to allow any author writing in English and published in Britain to vie for its long-standing annual Man Booker Prize for fiction, the rules for the MBIP were also adjusted. The prize used to be given every two years for a body of work, written in English or translated. Starting in 2016, it will be given for a single translated book published in Britain within a particular year. For the 2016 prize the judges read 155 submissions.
The £50,000 prize, divided equally between author and translator, comes at a moment of increasing interest in translated fiction in Britain. The six autobiographical novels by Karl Ove Knausgaard, “My Struggle”, and the four Neapolitan novels of Elena Ferrante (the last of which, “The Story of the Lost Child”, was also shortlisted for this year’s MBIP alongside “The Vegetarian”) have given erstwhile insular Britons a taste for foreign fiction.
A new survey by Nielsen Book, commissioned by the MBIP, showed that although literary fiction accounted for only 7% of fiction sales in Britain in 2015, translated fiction sales have doubled in the past 15 years, from 1.3m to 2.5m copies, at a time when the overall market for fiction fell from 51.6m in 2001 to 49.7m. Moreover, translated literary fiction now sells better than books originally written in English. In 2001 the average sale of a literary fiction title written in English was 1,153 copies, whereas the average for a translated title was only 482 copies. By 2015, the position was reversed: the average sale for a fiction title written in English was just 263 copies, whereas the average for a translated title was more than twice that—531 copies.