After she bit off a chunk of his face, that guard had to wear an aluminum mask for the rest of his life.

International Booker Prize 2023: our experts review the six

If Geumbok is not taken up by John Wayne at first, there are others like the cigar-chomping Godfather, who inhabit the text in different guises.

It won the 10th Munhakdongne Novel Award and has become one of the most loved novels in South Korea, where it is regarded as a modern classic. Alina and Laura are old friends whose relationship is based on eschewing procreation as the be all and end all. Mexican Laura is not just non-maternal (“I turned up at my gynaecologist’s office […] and asked him to tie my tubes”) but anti-maternal: she feels “crushed” when her best friend, Alina, wants to get pregnant. Rooms in which a chunk of their familiar time and memory is preserved to provide them with shelter in a rapidly erasing memory world. What it reveals is a valley filled with wild flowers and the promise of a scented breeze filling the air with the enchantment of stories.

Whale by Cheon Myeong-Kwan | Goodreads Whale by Cheon Myeong-Kwan | Goodreads

Translating literature is critical work and if translators hadn’t undertaken that labour, I would have been someone who’d never had the opportunity to read Hemingway or Conan Doyle. By turns fascinating, disgusting, horrifying and compelling - one of the most interesting and unique offerings from the International Booker longlist. The publication of Whale changed my life, and it feels like Whale is still a propulsive force in my life.The men shoveled coal into the kiln, sweat beading their thick, veiny forearms and their faces scarlet and shiny from the heat and light of the surging flames.

Whale by Cheon Myeong-kwan, translated by Chi An extract from Whale by Cheon Myeong-kwan, translated by Chi

A carnivalesque fairy tale that celebrates independence and enterprise, a picaresque quest through Korea’s landscapes and history, Whale is a riot of a book. You may also opt to downgrade to Standard Digital, a robust journalistic offering that fulfils many user’s needs. She’s nicknamed, by her girlfriend, after “those large, solitary rocks in southern Patagonia, pieces of world left over after creation, isolated and exposed to every element”. In Geumbok we see a woman determined to survive and succeed despite her vulnerability and the restrictions placed upon her as a woman. She was already seven kilos when she emerged and plumped up to more than a hundred kilos by the time she turned fourteen.The images that he conjures travel through several life-spans of, and trajectories of, the often cataclysmic changes that have rocked the Korean peninsula, bifurcated by the Communist North and the American flavoured South with its reliance on the capitalist model.