Read Han Kang's short novel The Vegetarian over the weekend. Think this won the Booker International Award, or something like that. Actually it was Runima who passed me a copy, and I'm glad she did. My first ever Korean novel.
It starts off strange and gets steadily stranger - always a good sign. Han Kang is the kind of writer who seems to feel things with great intensity, as if she's missing a layer of protection against the world, I'm tempted to say a layer of skin, but hesitate to use such a trite image given her novel's deployment of a brilliantly original sequence of images of the body as the site of conflict. (Though the nods towards Kafka - think The Hunger Artist - suggest something less than original, but wonderfully allusive.)
Very assured shifts of perspective also. It's a crafty novel, but hides its craftiness beneath the urgency of a compelling surface. I suppose many readers will see it as a novel of feminist protest, given the strikingly passive-aggressive figure at its centre, and the ways in which she is objectified by various males, but I think that's to underestimate the depth of its existential concerns.
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