THE VEGETARIAN Wins Man Booker International

9780553448184_795d0Author Han Kang and translator Deborah Smith win the Man Booker International Prize for The Vegetarian (PRH/Hogarth; BOT; 2/2/16; OverDrive Sample). Proving it is an award with selling power, the novel rose on Amazon’s sales rankings as a result, up from a lowly #27,707 to #272.

Kang represents South Korea while Smith is British, and in this Olympics of books, the two bested Italian Elena Ferrante, nominated for The Story of the Lost Child: Neapolitan Novels, Book Four, translated by American Ann Goldstein (PRH/Europa Editions, 9/1/15; Blackstone Audio; OverDrive Sample) as well as Turkish Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk, nominated for A Strangeness in My Mind, translated by Turkish Ekin Oklap (PRH/Knopf, Oct. 20, 2015; BOT; OverDrive Sample). See our earlier post for the full short list.

The Vegetarian is a surreal and violent novel about a woman who decides to stop eating meat. That act of self-determination, as Slate puts it sets off “a chain of catastrophes in her otherwise ordinary extended family … At first she rejects meat, but eventually she will excuse herself from a number of other common human activities, as well. At last she refuses humanity itself.”

Entertainment Weekly gives it an A, writing that the “astonishing” novel “viscerally explores the limits of what a human brain and body can endure, and the strange beauty that can be found in even the most extreme forms of renunciation.”

The daily NYT  calls it a “mesmerizing mix of sex and violence” while the NYT “Sunday Book Review”  says nothing can “prepare a reader for the traumas of this Korean author’s translated debut in the Anglophone world.”

In deciding the award the BBC reports the judges variously remarked the novel was “unforgettably powerful and original” and that “in a style both lyrical and lacerating, it reveals the impact of this great refusal both on the heroine herself and on those around her … This compact, exquisite and disturbing book will linger long in the minds, and maybe the dreams, of its readers.”

Remarkably, the BBC also reports that the book’s translator, Smith “only started teaching herself Korean in 2010,” picking that language as so few in her country studied it and she wanted a job that combined reading and writing. The BBC Arts correspondent is deeply impressed, saying she “managed brilliantly” and that “The prose is relaxed and idiomatic but it’s powerful. There isn’t a paragraph or turn of phrase which feels like it didn’t originate in English.”

The International Award is a younger sibling to the more well-known Booker Prize for Fiction (that longlist will be announced in July) and has been given every two years since 2005 to authors who are not citizens of the Commonwealth, for an entire body of work in any language (past winners have included Canadian Alice Munro and US citizens Philip Roth and Lydia Davis). Now that the main Booker Award is open to all writers in English, regardless of citizenship, the International Award has been changed this year to honor individual novels in English translation, recognizing not only the authors, but also the translators, a change that the Guardian notes, “should help raise the profile of translated books.”

Indeed, the award is a high water mark for translations and translators which are gaining wider recognition with feature stories in the WSJ and The Atlantic and, for the first time ever, a translated novel winning the Hugo Award. It is also an important resource for RA librarians searching for a more diverse and international list of authors to suggest.

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