Is The Vegetarian also a political treatise?

 In my lazy visiting of the currently-being-published and receiving such prizes as the Booker and Nobel Prize for literature, and making my own judgment about their merits, I am presently in Han Kang, reading her Human Acts.  After the Korean War, South Korea endured some dictators and the military's subduing of a protest in 1980.   A political treatise, can't at the same time be a good novel, or so I was taught years ago, but Kang is hammering the dictator and the soldiers he ordered to shoot unarmed protestors.  The government at the time said about 20 or 30 were killed, but I read elsewhere that the true number might be closer to 2,000; so this is a part of South Korea’s history that nearly every Korean is going to have an opinion about and those in leadership in 1980 are probably being excoriated in the same manner that French leaders under Phillipe Petain have been. 

But, does the Nobel Prize committee need to worry about whether a novel is political?   I wonder if they don't use the opposite criterion.  Consider The Vegetarian, the novel that won Han Kang the Booker prize.  I understand it has been applauded by feminists.  This has been denied by the reviewers I read, but after reading the novel, that is what I saw as well.  It doesn't take much to rake the flowers aside and look at the brutal treatment of the poor protagonist who has taken a firm stance.  She took a recognizable if not popular vegetarian stance, but in response to the cultural coercion she received, she took a position that clouded by poetry though it may be is a feminist stance.   After being held down and force-fed meat which she threw up, she resolved to take a further step and eat nothing at all.  Was she crazy?  No, she asks her sister whose charges are keeping her in the mental institution to let her go home.  The sister refuses.  Not just because she slept with the sister's husband, but because she refuses the wishes of their father and culture by not eating meat.  She becomes a feminist martyr by starving to death.

If the feminists and I are right about the nature of this novel rather than those who admire the beautiful poetic language, which those of us who don’t read Korean can’t properly judge (even though the translator of The Vegetarian won the Booker prize for translation), then the question remains, can a novel with a political agenda be a great novel? 

The Booker Prize was awarded to The Vegetarian, but the Nobel the other day seemed to be awarded to Kang's whole body of work.  I have read only two and a half novels, but these are her major novels if I can believe what has been written about her.