Michael Breen
When Han Kang won the Nobel Prize this month, people rushed to buy her works. Bookstores reported sales of over 1 million copies within a few days.
Besides the obvious interest in someone who has suddenly become internationally famous, how are we to interpret this? Might it be the spark that lights a sustained passion for reading among Koreans?
This would be transformative for, despite the high level of education, people here hardly ever read anything.
A government survey revealed that, in 2023, seven out of 10 adults hadn’t managed a single novel or nonfiction book in either print or e-book format throughout the entire year.
If they had picked one up, it’s likely it was to stick under a table leg or move to dust the bookshelf. Some may have started reading one, but then put it down and picked up the phone.
Thanks to the three people in 10 who did read a whole book, the average figure for each adult Korean last year was 3.9 books. That puts Koreans low on the international reading charts. Americans, by comparison, read around a book a month.
This makes me wonder if many of the 1 million Han Kang novels now in Korean homes will actually be read or whether they will lie accusingly on the shelf in the living room, like the copy of “Finnegans Wake” I bought as a student and which has sat there patiently for decades in houses and apartments in Edinburgh, London, New York and in a bunch of dongs in Seoul.
The reasons for the absence of a reading culture are no doubt complex. What isn’t? But I suspect that it comes down to a couple of things that go way back and are hard to shift.
One is the attitude to leisure. When I observe Korean people in a generalized way through a European lens, it seems to me that they are not able to relax. It’s as if they work hard, play hard and then flop asleep. In between activities, they look at their phones.
This even applies to vacations. The idea of a summer holiday when I was young was two weeks on the beach or beside the pool with perhaps a day of sightseeing and shopping. Koreans, I notice, only bother with beaches and pools if they have spent the previous two years preparing in the gym to look nonchalantly beautiful. The rest want a schedule for each day and shop and sightsee so furiously that they arrive back home after a trip more exhausted than when they left.
The only book you’ll see is the guide to Paris or wherever it is they’re going.
The other factor is the emotional associations around reading itself. It’s disliked, as befits something that is more an obligation than a personal choice.
The origin of this attitude becomes apparent when you consider the book reading statistics for students. These are very different from those of adults. Students read a lot. On average, they’re at it for around an hour and a half a day and get through 36 books a year.
We don’t need convincing that there’s no pleasure in this. It’s work. In fact, reading for pleasure is considered a waste of time. How else to explain that, as soon as the last exam is over, the book reading all but stops?
I know the feeling. I had a similar reaction studying English literature at university, where I fell foul of a critical, dissecting way of looking at what is considered literary that ruins any real appreciation of it.
In my second year, I had to read 20 or so Shakespeare plays. Let’s just say that not only can I not remember a thing about any of them but I’ve never read one since. I felt like someone who had gone into medicine to save mankind only to be forced for an entire year to study the workings — no offense to the bard — of the anus.
Actually, now that I’ve lanced that boil, I might have another go at “King Lear.”
But, to return to our question, is it possible that the international acknowledgment of Han Kang will change all this and turn Koreans into readers?
Anything is, of course, possible. As society gets more silver, Koreans might read more. If those international charts of reading habits come onto the national radar screen, there may be a competitive urge to rise to the top of them. Who knows?
The best thing, of course, would be a change in the education system.
But I’m not encouraged. I fear the sudden surge in sales is temporary, driven by the “bestseller” phenomenon. Reading as a habit is a very individualistic pastime. It requires a large dose of curiosity and a deal of self-motivation to satisfy it. Relying on the bestseller list betrays a passivity, a willingness to let others make the choice. That means there is more obligation than curiosity and pleasure in reading at play.
More optimistic people than me are recalling how Pak Se-ri inspired a generation. But, thinking of this example, I expect that Han Kang’s award is more likely to inspire some young people to want to become writers than to have an impact on the reading habits of the whole nation. I hope I’m wrong.
Michael Breen ([email protected]) is the author of “The New Koreans.”
This post was originally published on here
