The International Booker prize is the UK’s most prestigious award for translated fiction, with previous winners including Han Kang and Olga Tokarczuk. The prize money of £50,000 is divided equally between author and translator. This year’s winner will be announced on 23 May and the judging panel have produced a strong shortlist with a distinctive flavour: four brightly coloured, zestful novels and two, more restrained stories on the theme of motherhood.
Whale by Cheon Myeong-kwan, translated by Chi-Young Kim (Europa Editions, £14.99), is the South Korean author’s debut novel, first published in 2004. It’s an anarchic, often gruesome book – death by anvil, fire in a crowded theatre, a gangster who woos his beloved by sending her severed fingers – that succeeds through sheer charm. Central to his story is Geumbok, an ambitious young woman who dreams of building a cinema, and her daughter, Chunhui, a tall, muscular brick-maker. There’s so much going on that almost every subsection of each chapter could be a novella in itself, filled with old crones, physical grotesques and cartoonish violence. It’s not always easy to see whether the creaky descriptions of women – Geumbok’s “exceptionally wide rump”, Chunhui being “fat and unattractive, so unlike her mother” – are a satire of sexist attitudes or an enactment of them (Cheong cites Updike and Bukowski as key influences). Still, it is never, ever boring, even if the relentlessness is occasionally exhausting.
