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I didn’t seek out The Vegetarian when I first read it. I was on a book buying ban and in the lucky position to be living with a fellow hoarder. As I perused our combined stacks, a slim volume by an author I hadn’t heard of caught my eye, and I am glad it did. The Vegetarian by Han Kang is exactly my sort of story: dark, disturbing and beautifully wrought.
Yeong-hye is, as her husband charmingly says, “completely unremarkable in every way” – that is, until she becomes vegetarian. This decision sends her world, and her extended family’s, spinning aggressively off its axis. You may be thinking this is a bit dramatic (vegetarianism is normal), and it is.
The Korean satirical sensibility often disturbs you into realising humanity is messed up. Parasite (winner of the Oscar for best picture in 2020), Oldboy (the 2003 thriller that inspired John Wick) and The Vegetarian are born of the same sort of urgency to expose our shared ability for violence, which they attest is always there, simmering just beneath the surface.
The Vegetarian won the 2016 Man Booker International Prize, and Kang has now emerged as the surprise winner of this year’s Nobel prize in literature. She is one of the youngest writers to win. Artful is a word that comes to mind when thinking about her sparse and beautiful prose, which also manages to be so dense in meaning. It makes sense that Kang is a poet, and this quality in her translations is a testament to her translator, Deborah Smith.
As our writer, Jenni Ramone, notes, The Vegetarian was likely to have been the work that influenced the judging panel the most. Kang manages to fit a lot of horror into this slim text (it’s less than 200 pages) without it feeling crowded. It’s a searing novel, visceral and savage in its imagery, which is so elegantly and economically described.
I am currently in the lucky position of possessing an early reader copy of Kang’s newest novel We Do Not Part, which is out next year. I am so excited to get stuck in. Until then, I urge you to read The Vegetarian and to delve further into Kang’s catalogue, her poetry in particular.
Read more: Han Kang: innovative South Korean author wins the 2024 Nobel prize for literature
Korean art and British horror
Hallyu, the wave of Korean art and culture that has taken the west by storm, is going strong. Literature is getting its moment in the sun right now, and maybe Korea’s art will be next. If you want to be ahead of the curve, you should head down to London’s Southbank where you can catch artist Haegue Yang’s Leap Year at the Hayward Gallery.
The work is bright and bold, Yang is certainly an original and radical artist. The exhibition is a major retrospective of her work in which you will find collage, sculpture and installations featuring sound and even scent. Our reviewer, Martin Lang, writes: “Yang’s work suggests that art, too, has the power to bridge divides and foster empathy, breaking down barriers between cultures.”
Read more: Haegue Yang’s Leap Year is a bold and diverse show mixing cultural references and folk traditions
“I remember watching it as a teenager in a lesson at school and once was enough for me,” writes politics academic Mark Lacy of the BBC film Threads, a truly terrifying imagining of the impact of a nuclear war on a city in the north of England from 1984. The film hasn’t been available to watch for decades, but has recently been put on iPlayer for us all to relive its horror.
As Lacy outlines, “it’s a brutal and grim tour of the aftermath of nuclear war, which anyone who viewed it when originally aired may struggle to watch again”. Lacy watched it at a time when the possibility of cold war tensions escalating was very real. While we have certainly been exposed to more nuclear fallout stories since, the film is once again available to watch at a time when the fear of attacks on nuclear facilities is again in the news.
The making of legends
The film The Apprentice also comes at a time of great nervousness as the US election draws near. The film, set in the 1970s and 1980s, charts the business career of presidential hopeful Donald Trump. It centres around Trump’s relationship with the prosecutor Roy Cohn, from whom he is said to have learned underhanded ways of business and Machiavellian dealmaking.
As our reviewer, professor of international relations Michelle Bentley, writes, it comes at a controversial time – with fewer than three weeks until the election. “The film seeks to get inside Trump’s mindset, not only as a businessperson, but unpicking what drove him in the White House, as well as the election he’s now fighting,” writes Bentley, who goes on to explain whether the film will affect the election at all. It is certainly a major event in this dramatic election.
Read more: The Apprentice: released so close to the polls, this Trump biopic is inevitably political
There are so many brilliant music documentaries giving long-deserved dues to musicians who have fallen into obscurity but who had major influence on so many artists and genres. Think the films Searching For Sugarman and Getting It Back: The Story of Cymande. A wonderful new addition to this genre is Harder Than the Rock about the Cimarons.
This lovely piece by sociologist Kenny Monrose is full of childhood anecdotes of their music. The group were the UK’s first reggae band, and looking at the long list of people they worked with, from Bob Marley to Paul McCartney, it’s startling how little known they are – even by the film’s director, Mark Warmington. My colleague Anna said she had a wonderful afternoon editing Monrose’s piece while listening to the band’s music, which you we highly recommend you do too.
