To read on vacation: novels from two Nobel Awards

Now it is known that “The vegetarian” It is not the story of a woman who adopts that food regime that is “an attitude and a lifestyle”, but of one that wants to become a vegetable. That is not something planned, it is something that advances in it from its decisions that cause it in which they surround it increasingly violent confrontations and impositions.

Yeong-Hye is a Seoul housewife who works to transcribe dialogues in the comics balloons. Her husband, Chong, is satisfied because she is a common woman who does not stand out at all. Chong, an outstanding employee, has the arrogance of a palurdo. The submission of his wife allows him to overcome his hidden complex of inferiority. The only thing that bothers him is not to use a bodice. One night he wakes up and she is not in bed. He finds her pulling the fridge meat in the garbage. He explains: “I have had a dream.” A GORE DREAM (AND EAST TRADITION OF THE SUPERNATURAL). He was caught in a slaughterhouse, bathed in blood. From there he decides not to eat meat again. That causes clashes. Chong asks Yeong-Hye’s family. Violence explodes to ferocity, and she ends up locked in a psychiatric. It is the first part of the triptych composed of “The vegetarian”, “La Mancha Mongólica” and “The trees in flames”.

In the second part, Yeong-Hye’s brother-in-law, a failed artist video, finds inspiration in an organic dance show, which drives him to make a video where flowers and plants join sexually through a man and a woman. When he finds out that his sister-in-law has a birth mark in the form of a petal, he resolves that Yeong-Hye has to be the protagonist. She access. He loves being a plant. Everything ends in a lustful catastrophe, and the reinternation of it.

In the final stage, Inhye, older sister of Yeong-Hye, divorced from the video artist, the visit in the psychiatric. Yeong’s deterioration is alarming, he refuses to eat, he feels happy to stop being an animal, he would like to be a tree and live in rain and sun.

In this novel Colossal and overwhelmingthe style is transformed, goes from apathy and violence, to Afiebrada sexuality, to the final glare of a poetic melancholy.

The South Korean Hang Kang published in 2007 “The vegetarian” that Best Seller was immediate in his country. In 2012, it comes out in Argentina in the publishing house under the moon. In 2016 he won the Man Booker International Award. Already disseminated in the West the rest of his work, in 2024 Hang Kang Win the Nobel Prize. It has published 15 books, with poems, stories, novels and essays.

Most interpretations of “The vegetarian” They usually rule out the political and the social, and mark the struggle for independence and personal identity in an ultracapitalist society marked by isolation and alienation. In more recent books –“Human acts”, “The Greek class”, “White”– The political is more presence.

Hang Kang “The vegetarian” (Bs.as, Random House, 2024, 167 pages).

Modian

“What mysterious chemistry makes a little group form: the same is dispersed very fast that remains homogeneous for years?”Cavila the narrator of “Memory Lane”. That question leads to Mondian“The Proust of our time”, goes for the search for lost youth. His premise is the verse of René Char “living is stubborn to consummate a memory.”

Achieve it through countless stories, novels, plays and scripts, made it Modian The Nobel Prize “for the art of memory with which the most elusive human destinations” will conquer in 2014. For example, illuminating in its first books the dark world of Nazi occupation of France. Books that were not based on his memories (then he was just eight years old) but he made the memories of others, and of self -fiction one of its characteristics.

In “Memory Lane” A twenty -year -old employee of a musical publishing house, meets a talent hunter, tours organizer and author of a musical, who one day invites him to turn around, recover the enjoyment of the enjoyment of the flaneur. The nascent friendship leads him to invite him to know a group of interesting people. Unexpectedly, it falls in the middle of a set of elegant, sophisticated, bohemian, idle people, where the trips are, the stays in rooms and in residences on the Costa Azul, fashion parades, concerts, bridge or poker games.

Paul Coutour -abogado, financier, horse merchant, who neglects her economic problems-, and his wife Maddy, former model, are the center where all converge, and then, in reciprocity, take them to their properties, new celebrations, rest and neglect . In the portraits of those characters Modian It is hinting at what is silent, what good customs make it hid, the figuration of some, the superb self -confidence of others. Doug, an American, from Kentucky, who does not end up being that environment, every so often sings “Memory Lane”a song of his people, and others continue to sing from a group of horses that go along the avenue of memory, for which they will not return, but in which they leave their traces marked.

For this book Modian He associated with his friend, the painter and illustrator Pierre Le-tanachieving a work that recovers the high quality enlightened story, while delivering the album of a high class in decline, within the framework of a beautiful object book.

Patrick Modiano- Pierre Le-tan “Memory Lane” (Bs.AS., Anagrama, 2025, 85 pages)