On Reading the Nobel Laureates Han Kang and László Krasznahorkai
I first read both László Krasznahorkai’s Satantango
and Han Kang’s『すべての、白いものたちの』 The White Book on my Kindle.
Their worlds could not be more different,
yet together they form a striking contrast.
Krasznahorkai writes as though continuing the tradition of the Central European epic.
His endless sentences sweep forward like a flood,
carrying with them the ruins of a collapsing world.
There is a will within his prose—
a determination not to abandon language even when everything falls apart.
As his words flow on, they begin to take on the cadence of a prayer,
and somewhere in that darkness, I sense a faint glimmer of light.
Han Kang stands at the opposite pole.
Her words rise out of silence,
and The White Book reads like a prose poem.
The color white becomes a quiet illumination of loss, memory, and renewal.
What she chooses not to say gives shape to pain.
Each fragment lands softly,
like a feather falling onto snow,
and melts before one can touch it.
If Krasznahorkai depicts the world through the persistence of narration,
Han Kang listens to it through the silence of fragments.
Epic and prose poem, flood and stillness—
between these two extremes, literature continues to search for the human voice.
I read them both in the same light of my Kindle.
On its pale screen, black letters seemed to breathe.
There was no scent of paper, no weight of pages,
and yet, in that electronic glow,
the words carried a strange warmth and tranquility.
It cannot be a coincidence
that the Nobel Prize in Literature has gone to these two in succession.
In an age overflowing with words and losing its silences,
literature once again turns to the space between—
between the prose poem and the epic—
to listen for the voice of what it means to live.