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Asia Times
06-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Asia Times
In We Do Not Part, Han Kang faces historical traumas with compassion
It's daunting to review a novel written by someone who, in 2024, received the Nobel Prize in Literature. The prize was awarded for Han Kang's 'intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life': a description that applies equally to this newly translated work. We Do Not Part tells the story of Kyungha, a writer of 20th-century South Korean history, and her longterm friend Inseon, a documentary filmmaker and photographer. Both women are increasingly choosing isolation over the busy professional and social lives they had lived. Kyungha has pretty much withdrawn from her professional life. She is suffering from depression and anxiety, restless nights and exhausted solitary days. She is losing contact with those she loves. Inseon had moved from Seoul to the remote island of Jeju several years earlier to care for her ageing mother. After her mother's death, she chose to remain on the island and switch from screen-based work to furniture-making. The novel is told in three parts. The long first section, titled Bird, opens with a dream sequence. It goes on to recount a comparatively linear narrative of past and present. The shorter middle part, Night, is a deep dive into the horrors of history. The ending, Flame, is very short, told in fragments. The novel ends with what seems to be a dream, where the two women light a candle in the dark, in the depths of snow. The dream that opens the novel is of 'thousands of black tree trunks jutted from the earth.… Stooped and listing, they gave the impression of a thousand men, women and haggard children huddling in the snow.' Trees that represent people; children who are haggard: these are worryingly bleak images. In the distorted reality of the dreamworld, Kyungha wonders: 'Was this a graveyard? … Are those gravestones?' The dream moves on, and she finds that she is walking through water. First her feet are wet, then she is ankle-deep, and then the 'graves' are underwater, being washed away by the sea, and she alone must try to preserve any that can be saved. This sets the stage for all that is to come: evidence of massacres, nature turned into a stage for terrible events, a bone-chilling awareness of sorrow. This might sound like an unpromising entry point for a novel, but let me assure readers that the story offers real rewards. I was a touch undone by the first chapters, but the beauty of the prose kept me going. The thoughtful, engaging portraits of the generosity, integrity and courage of the two key characters, too, provided an appealing path on which to follow the narrative. In the early chapters, Kyungha presents as a person suffering from PTSD. She has been flirting with death for some time. What is keeping her alive is that she can't find a way to write what she believes to be 'a proper letter of farewell, a true leavetaking.' The elements and circumstances seem to conspire against her peace. Through the novel's first chapters, Kyungha is surviving a hot humid summer. All she is able to do is shower, shred the drafts of her farewell letters, and lie on the floor imagining snow. She has been brought to this point as a result of her researching and writing about a massacre in a place she names G— (perhaps Gwangju, the site of a massacre in May 1980, which Han Kang addressed in her 2014 novel Human Acts). Kyungha's account of how she is – barely – managing day-to-day life reads like a textbook case of vicarious trauma. She speculates that translating the dream-image into an art work might break its grip. Kyungha approaches Inseon, who has a long record of producing interesting if financially unviable projects. Inseon agrees to collaborate with her on this dream project. But four years go by without them ever managing to synchronise their schedules or begin the work. Then, after some months of silence, a text from Inseon pings into Kyungha's phone. It asks her to come to a Seoul hospital. Inseon is there, being treated for an accident involving an electric saw. She has turned to her old friend to ask Kyungha to travel to Jeju and save her budgie, which will otherwise die of thirst. The novel then enters what can loosely be read as a quest narrative. It is now mid-winter and a wild snowstorm is on the way. Inseon's home is in a village a long way from the airport, and snow is threatening to shut down the roads. Nonetheless, Kyungha agrees to take up the quest. She finds herself in an unfamiliar location with a looming frightening weather event and no practical knowledge about how to reach Inseon's home. As she struggles to reach the destination, she finds herself spiraling like the snow in this winter storm. There is neither precision nor even clarity here: Much as the story leaps back through decades, then feels its way back to now, Kyungha stumbles through a landscape that she cannot map and plunges precipitately off the paths. Snowdrifts obscure the roads and 'snowflakes resembling a flock of tens of thousands of birds appear like a mirage and sweep over the sea.' Scratched, bruised and almost frozen, Kyungha finds herself at Inseon's door, where she is completely isolated: 'When I looked back,' she says, 'the lone path that bore my deep footprints lay in silence.' And there she remains, trapped by the weather, haunted by the stories of those she had interviewed for her book on the G— massacre. Stories of running from bullets, bodies being piled up, hiding for years in forests and caves: all the unendurable things that people nonetheless endured. The second part of the novel begins with a version of the initial dream of the sea and tree trunks that are metaphors of the dead. Kyungha wakes from this dream to find herself in a sort of ontological uncertainty. Inseon has (impossibly) joined her at the cottage. Kyungha can't determine whether this is another dream, or if Inseon has died and is visiting her as a spirit, or if she herself has died is only imagining that she is alive and present. What is not in doubt, though, is the historical record. Kyungha finds that she is not the only person who has been researching state-sanctioned massacres. Inseon has been busy investigating what is known as the April 3rd uprising and the long massacre that followed from 1947 to 1954. This massacre was organized and undertaken by the US military and the new Republic of Korea, based on the flawed notion that the Jeju islanders were communists. It resulted in the deaths of around 30,000 people. Citizens of Jeju awaiting execution, May 1948. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons Nietzsche warned that 'if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you'. Han Kang's version of this idea is, as she writes in We Do Not Part, that 'looking squarely at the injury made it all the more excruciating'. Here it is Inseon's nightmares that dominate: This is where her family and people died and where their traces remain. But both women are carriers of nightmare stories. Both stagger under the weight. They have both looked squarely at the excruciating injuries of state-sanctioned murder and they carry the wounds of those histories. This is an issue Han Kang has been tracing through her novels. Her stories engage, one way or another, with the problem of violence. As she writes in Human Acts, she sees the tendency to 'uniform brutality' as something 'imprinted in our genetic code.' But she also notes, in her Nobel Lecture, that we humans 'simultaneously stand opposite such overwhelming violence.' Yes, we do terrible things, but we also do generous and compassionate things. We live simultaneously in the scarred world of human history and in the less-damaged natural world. We Do Not Part portrays massacres and trauma, contrasted with trees and seawater, walks in forests and glorious hymns to snow. It is a novel that depicts a beautiful world, one worth living in, and for. It is a novel that looks, perhaps too squarely, at recent history, while finding consolation in small acts of kindness and community, and in the assurance that, however we understand the phrase, we do not part. Jen Webb is a distinguished professor of creative practice in the Faculty of Arts and Design, University of Canberra. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
New York Times
28-02-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Book Club: Read ‘We Do Not Part,' by Han Kang, With the Book Review
Humanity has a funny relationship with history: We never quite know what to do with it. Let the past be the past, some say. If we don't learn from history, we're doomed to repeat it, others counter. But history doesn't care what we want; it will make its presence known, whether we like it or not. That's certainly the case in the Nobel laureate Han Kang's new book, 'We Do Not Part.' The novel, which was translated by E. Yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris, is a pet-sitting quest gone surreal. The story follows Kyungha, a writer and documentarian who is summoned to a hospital in Seoul by her close friend and former collaborator, Inseon. Inseon, it turns out, has sliced off her fingertips while working in her carpentry workshop. She's now stuck in the hospital undergoing a painful treatment that will keep her bedridden for weeks. Worried about her pet parakeet, Ama, who was abandoned at home in the emergency and has most certainly run out of food, Inseon asks Kyungha to travel to her house and care for the bird. The only issue? Inseon's house is hundreds of miles away, on the island of Jeju, and there's a blizzard barreling toward it that will soon cut off access to the area. Despite the perilous trip, Kyungha makes it, but once there, she doesn't just find the bird. She also finds an apparition of Inseon, who has a devastating history to tell. Transforming real life into a haunting dreamscape, 'We Do Not Part' is about grief, tragedy, the weight of the past, and the painful but essential work of remembering, delivered by one of the most electrifying writers working today. (Han's 2016 novel, 'The Vegetarian,' won the International Booker Prize and was recently named one of The New York Times's Best Books of the 21st Century.) In March, the Book Review Book Club will read and discuss 'We Do Not Part,' by Han Kang. We'll be chatting about the book on the Book Review podcast that airs on March 28, and we'd love for you to join the conversation. Share your thoughts about the novel in the comments section of this article by March 20, and we may mention your observations in the episode. Here's some related reading to get you started: We can't wait to discuss the book with you. In the meantime, happy reading!
The Guardian
09-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
We Do Not Part by Han Kang review – a harrowing journey into South Korea's bloody history
When Han Kang published her International Booker-winning The Vegetarian (2015), translated by Deborah Smith, about a South Korean housewife who gives up meat and wants to become a tree, the novel slotted into a wave of English-language fiction about female appetites and male control. But the books that came next were harder to pin down. After Human Acts, about the 1980 massacre of student protesters in Han's native Gwangju, came The White Book, in which a Han-like novelist reflects on the death of her baby sister while musing on wartime Warsaw. Then came 2023's Greek Lessons, riddling to the point of opacity, about a divorced poet's inability to communicate. We Do Not Part, Han's first novel to be translated since winning the Nobel prize for literature last year, has elements of all these books. Stark as well as ethereal, chronologically discontinuous, full of nested narratives – often structured as remembered conversations about remembered conversations – it exhumes historical horror but also swerves into hallucinatory magic realism without breaking the plausibly autofictional frame with which it begins. Our narrator is the Seoul-based author Kyungha, whose life has gone off the rails after publishing a novel that sounds a lot like Human Acts (it's about 'a massacre at G–'). Even watching passersby is traumatic, reminding her of life's fragility ('The flesh, organs, bones, breaths passing before my eyes all held within them the potential to snap, to cease – so easily, and by a single decision'). She can't shake the memory of the survivors she wrote about, putting herself in the place of mothers who sheltered from gunfire with their children in a well. 'In retrospect it baffles me. Having decided to write about mass killings and torture, how could I have so naively – brazenly – hoped to soon shirk off the agony of it, to so easily be bereft of its traces?' This is all happening at an unspecified point in the recent near-present. Kyungha, having previously held down a job to support her family, now doesn't have to – not only because her daughter's no longer a child, but also because of some coyly hinted-at domestic rift in the wake of her breakdown. She's struggling to think of anyone she can name in her will – a symbol of her predicament – when out of the blue comes a text from Inseon, an old colleague from her journalism days. A visual artist living alone on Jeju Island, about 300 miles away, she's now in hospital in Seoul after an accident at her studio, and she needs Kyungha to go and take care of her abandoned pet bird – a request Kyungha accepts, despite the hazardous snowbound trek it entails. Thus does the novel's musing give way to a quixotic rescue mission ('Inseon had told me that to save her I had to get her water within the day. But when does the day end for a bird?'), shifting in tone yet further once Kyungha arrives only to find Inseon – or a vision of her – already there, and ready this time to elaborate on the horror that their previous conversations only circled: the state's mass murder of civilians in Jeju during anti-communist violence in the late 1940s, prior to the Korean war, a bloody history that scarred Inseon's family, not least her late mother, whom she nursed through dementia. The harrowing testimonies she presents Kyungha ultimately constitute We Do Not Part's main business. In contrast to Human Acts, the stories of violence don't come to us via narratorial recreation, exactly; they instead emerge solely from quotation in the form of interviews with the eyewitnesses and relatives whose accounts Kyungha hears from Inseon and then passes to us – a storytelling technique that, while no less a performance on Han's part, gives the impression of being less presumptuous, more ethically scrupulous. When Han won the Nobel, she said she couldn't celebrate amid war in Gaza and Ukraine. John Banville puckishly responded by saying the committee should take back the award, but it would be hard to read We Do Not Part and not think her words heartfelt. Even at its most seemingly inessential – witness the repeated lingering descriptions of snowflakes – the book insists quietly on the necessity to pay attention, to never turn away, to look, to see. As a message, it risks appearing somewhat frictionless, even self-serving, offering reward without cost, but it's worth remembering how this strange and unsettling novel begins: with the nightmare-haunted protagonist, alone. We Do Not Part by Han Kang is published by Hamish Hamilton (£18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at Delivery charges may apply
Telegraph
09-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
An encounter with the phantoms of South Korea's brutal military past
Since she won the International Booker Prize in 2016 for her novel The Vegetarian (as translated by Deborah Smith), Han Kang's reputation beyond her native South Korea Han's 2014 novel Human Acts took as its subject the 1980 uprising in Gwangju – during which workers and students were murdered by the Republic of Korea Army while protesting against the imposition of martial law – and this new work wrestles with another violent episode in that nation's modern history. In this instance, it's the 1948-9 massacre, again by the military, of 30,000 citizens on the island of Jeju. Unlike Human Acts, though, a novel in which past horrors are reanimated and made immediate, We Do Not Part takes a slanting and somewhat disorienting approach. A woman named Kyungha is on a journey in aid of her injured friend, Inseon. She has agreed to travel from Seoul – where she lives, and where Inseon is currently in hospital – to Jeju, where Inseon's pet bird has been left without food or water. Already hurrying against the clock, Kyungha finds her journey becoming all the more arduous when a blizzard envelops the island shortly after her arrival. Befuddled and exhausted by her struggles through the snow, and battling with an incapacitating migraine, Kyungha seems to lose her grip on reality. Inexplicably, Inseon herself appears, a presence Kyungha accepts as an apparition both of and not of this world. The phantasm reveals the terrible story of Inseon's family's suffering and loss during Jeju's blood-soaked history, and the long, traumatic shadow this has cast – first over Inseon's mother, and now over Inseon herself. There's a description early on of the people whom Inseon, who used to be a documentary film-maker, took as her subjects: 'women whose lives had intersected with history'. 'Intersected' is a strange term, but given the crystalline quality of the prose throughout – rendered in English with poise by E Yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris – I can't believe the translation is sloppy. Rather, I say 'strange' because it sets up a separation between people and events, and past and present, that the subsequent narrative well and truly dismantles. While I found that dismantling a convincing move, the second half of the book – in which Han relates the horrifying details of the massacre – ultimately falls rather flat. Prior to that, Kyungha's desperate journey through the snow and ice has been written with extraordinary beauty and edge-of-one's-seat compulsion. Han renders Jeju both dream-like and viscerally real at once. Take this description of snowflakes melting into wet asphalt 'like a trailing sentence at the close of a conversation, like the dying fall of a cadence, like fingertips cautiously retreating before ever landing on a shoulder, the flakes sink into the slick blackness and are soon gone'. By comparison to the immediacy and tangibility of these initial action-heavy pages, the massacre and its after-effects are related at a remove – stories from the past filtered through various tellings and retellings, all of which conspire to create a more workman-like feel. We're told of the long shadows these horrors have cast, yet they remained, for me, at a distance. More so than the secrets of Inseon's family's past, I was compelled by the mystery that is Kyungha and her life. There are the enigmatic occlusions in her own history; her lonely, isolated existence; her mental and physical fragility. They all combine to create a porousness through which Kyungha – and we – can access experiences beyond her or our own. 'When someone who hasn't slept soundly in a while, who is stumbling through a period of nightmares blurring with reality, chances across a scene that defies belief, they may well initially doubt themselves,' she admits early on. We Do Not Part is a novel of doubt, distrust, hauntings – though who's being haunted by whom, or by what, isn't straightforward at all. We Do Not Part by Han Kang, tr E Yaewon & Paige Aniyah Morris, is published by Hamish Hamilton at £18.99. To order your copy for £16.99, call 0330 173 5030 or visit
