We Do Not Part

by Han Kang, E. Yaewon (Translator), Paige Aniyah Morris (Translator)

Han Kang’s most revelatory book since The Vegetarian, We Do Not Part tells the story of a friendship between two women while powerfully reckoning with a hidden chapter in Korean history.

One winter morning, Kyungha receives an urgent message from her friend Inseon to visit her at a hospital in Seoul. Inseon has injured herself in an accident, and she begs Kyungha to return to Jeju Island, where she lives, to save her beloved pet—a white bird called Ama. A snowstorm hits the island when Kyungha arrives. She must reach Inseon’s house at all costs, but the icy wind and squalls slow her down as night begins to fall. She wonders if she will arrive in time to save the animal—or even survive the terrible cold that envelops her with every step. Lost in a world of snow, she doesn’t yet suspect the vertiginous plunge into the darkness that awaits her at her friend’s house.

Blurring the boundaries between dream and reality, We Do Not Part powerfully illuminates a forgotten chapter in Korean history, buried for decades—bringing to light the lost voices of the past to save them from oblivion. Both a hymn to an enduring friendship and an argument for remembering, it is the story of profound love in the face of unspeakable violence—and a celebration of life, however fragile it might be.

Genres: Fiction, Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction, Asia, Audiobook, Historical, Contemporary

256 pages, Hardcover

First published September 9, 2021

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.

소설가 한강

Han Kang was born in 1970 in South Korea. She is the author of The Vegetarian, winner of the International Booker Prize, as well as Human Acts, The White Book, Greek Lessons, and We Do Not Part. In 2024, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature “for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life.”

Reviews

[s.penkevich [mental health hiatus] · Rating 5 out of 5]

‘History is like a horror story…’
— Roberto Bolaño

While I often marvel at the ductility of language to be drawn out and directed towards abstract meaning, rarely have I found such an impressive dexterity with dynamic metaphor as is offered in Han Kang’s We Do Not Part. You’ll never think of snow the same again. The Nobel laureate’s most recent novel functions like a memorial to a nearly forgotten massacre while confronting unspeakable horrors of history and the limitations of art to bear their witness and continuously spirals back to metaphorical musings on snow. Kang’s imagery glistens upon every page and speaks loudly in such a quiet novel, taking on a multifaceted pliability able to simultaneously reach into all the novel’s multitudinous theme as expressions of silence, accumulating history, gathering terror and more as snowfall binds each detail of the novel into an overarching landscape as stark and chilling as the blizzard which besets the narrator. Kang’s use of snow resists a singular purpose and is but one of We Do Not Part’s elusive qualities that elevates the ambiguous and nightmarish dreamscapes in which we find the present forever haunted by history. What arrives is as profound as it is profoundly unsettling, an unflinching portrait of unearthed atrocities and the whispers of the past that offer shades of Pedro Paramo from Mexican author Juan Rulfo. A poetic powerhouse of a novel, translated into English by E. Yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris, We Do Not Part stares in the face of horror and history in search of the human within them.

‘As the snow lands on the wet asphalt, each flake seems to falter for a moment. Then, like a trailing sentence at the close of a conversation, like the dying fall of a final cadence, like fingertips cautiously retreating before ever landing on a shoulder, the flakes sink into the slick blackness and are soon gone.’

Imagine winning the Nobel Prize and knowing your masterpiece has yet to be revealed to the English speaking world. Han Kang, who was not only the first South Korean to be awarded the prize but also the first Asian woman, has a striking gift for ‘intense poetic prose,’ as the Nobel committee wrote, ‘that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life.’ The same could serve as a one-line description for We Do Not Part. The prose elegantly crafts the most sinister of atmospheres where silence is ‘taut as fabric in an embroidery hoop,’ night is ‘a sea of ink,’ or the massacred masses are like ‘blackened trees’ or ‘pillars of ashes’ as Kang plunges us into the bloody wounds of history and ‘past the zone where the pressure bears down like thunder and living creatures no longer emit light.’ Imagery repeats like a refrain, with snow, birds, candles, trees, and snow weaving through the pages. There are passages that feel like they could have come from a horror novel, an effect that highlights power as a violent beast that recalls the works of Roberto Bolaño. For example:

‘The front door and windows rattle. Maybe it isn’t the wind. Maybe someone’s actually there. Maybe they’ve come to drag out whoever’s inside. To slash and burn To fit with target vests and tie up against trees. Against that black tree as it brandishes its saw-blade arms.’

Largely taking place on Jeju Island, a request from an old friend brings the narrator, Kyungha, into the recorded histories of the 1949 massacre when the government put down a general strike and uprising on the island, killing around 30,000 civilians and forcing 40,000 to flee to Japan as part of an "eradication campaign" and anti-communist crackdown.

Jeju Island

Information about the uprising was censored and suppressed for decades and the island became a popular tourist attractions. Groups such as Jeju Dark Tours, however, have tried to draw attention to the previously silenced slaughter stating ‘it is crucial to deliver the message that we will no longer keep silent against the state violence and that we won’t let this happen again.’ This too can be said of We Do Not Part where bearing witness even amidst creative failure is at the heart of Kang’s story.

‘Life was exceedingly vulnerable, I realized. 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.’

In a 2017 article for New York Times Kang discussed how her work is bid to understand the ‘face of universal humanity that is revealed in the history of this world.’ The face staring back, we find, is bathed in blood and writhing in fear:

‘I wanted to ask what it is that makes human beings harm others so brutally, and how we ought to understand those who never lose hold of their humanity in the face of violence.’

Kang concludes that ‘The last line of defense by which human beings can remain human is the complete and true perception of another’s suffering,’ which requires action ‘which goes beyond simple compassion for the suffering of others, [and] is demanded of us at every moment.’ This calls to mind the art memorial attempted by Kyungha and Inseon in order to bear witness to the history, though their inability to complete it brushes on the past censorship, and an inability to truly reckon with violent power. Creative failure also thwarts Kyungha’s novel on the 1980 Gwangju Uprising which was violently suppressed by the South Korean military and claimed the lives of 2,300 citizens (this was the focus of Kang’s earlier novel, Human Acts) as the weight of the horrors send Kyungha spiraling into self-isolation. Abandoned by even her family who ‘couldn’t bear to witness’ her in this state, she attempts to re-emerge into the ‘lived-in world’ only to find the past has many more ghosts afoot.

Citizens arrested by the military awaiting execution on Jeju.

‘At some point, as the materials piled up and began to take on a clearer form, I could feel myself changing. To the point where it seemed nothing one human being did to another could ever shock me again.’

While she shares a former project with her narrator, Kang certainly does not share the lack of creativity that assails Kyungha. Told in three sections not unlike her breakout novel, The Vegetarian, though while that novel moved between different narrators this retains the same overall narrator while still reading with a rotation of unique styles and textures. Old newspaper clippings, diary entries, and letters whisper their histories with ‘the faintest of voices’ as Kyungha discovers the lengthy research into the atrocity and documentations compiled by Inseon’s now deceased mother. It is a postmodern novel at its stylistic heart, though one with no interest in announcing itself as such with the bells and whistles that tend to accompany western novels of the genre. Making strong use of imagery, foreshadowing, and an unnerving sense of foreboding that tremors across every page, Kang compounds a cavalcade of impressions of the massacre, of the ‘children killed in the name of extermination,’ and it’s emotionally devastating aftermath that afflicts people for decades, each individually small and light but accumulating into a heavy, heart wrenching mass. Just like the falling snow.

‘The thing is, every time it snows, it comes back. I try not to think about it, but it keeps coming back.’

An entire dissertation could be written on Kang’s use of dynamic metaphor and her depictions of snow in We Do Not Part. Her grasp on figurative language masquerading as pastoral imagery is simply exquisite. ‘If the distance between the clouds and the ground were infinite,’ Kyungha muses, ‘the snowflakes too would grow to infinity.’ . Snow accumulated in meaning as much as it does upon the ground here, becoming a symbol of silence, history, death, time, memory, and even individual lives that can suddenly dissolve. It is ‘a snow that seemed to have been falling for decades—no, centuries,’ Kang writes, an amalgamating power of individual moments in history forming a giant history of trauma, and she asks us to witness it. Both as individual flakes and the whole overpowering and deadly mass.

‘This brief consent, I realized, held the entire weight of her life.’

The novel also confronts us with questions on the limitations of bearing witness. Such a task is of the utmost importance in art, to give a voice to mass suffering, to educate and speak against the propagative erasure of power, to champion empathy in the face of indifference, and to give physical memorial as an act both of remembrance and warning against allowing history to repeat itself. Yet to what extent can art truly stand as testimony? Cathy Park Hong, poet and author of Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning, questions this in her article Against Witness , citing Susan Sontag’s observations that art depicting bodies in pain can be fetishized similarly as art depicting bodies in the nude. ‘To make art representing another victim’s pain can be ethically thorny,’ Hong writes:

‘Images of suffering can arouse our horror, simulating an illusive identification between us and the victim or “a fantasy of witness” before we are conveniently deposited back into our lives so that someone else’s trauma becomes our personalized catharsis.’

Such was the case with the poem Death Fugue by
Paul Celan where it’s use in memorial ceremony became a way to quickly dip into procedural homage that left audiences patting themselves on the back for going through the motions without earnestly interrogating the horrors of history. As Cathy Park Hong writes:

‘Rather than an act of rememberance, the recitation of “Death Fugue” turned into a mantra to ward off difficult engagement with the past. But this is how it is when a poem becomes commemorative. It 
becomes all pious gesture and drained of meaning. When a poem becomes commemorative, it dies.’

The ethics of art as memorial have long been a debate amongst artists and scholars of the Holocaust. Irving Howe feared representations would ‘ ‘domesticate it, rendering it familiar and in some sense even tolerable.’ Berel Lang, a philosopher who wrote published extensively on the ethical questions around artistic representation of the Holocaust, concludes that art ‘must be judged against the criterion of respectful silence that should be our first response to it’ but also that despite its appropriateness, silence cannot convey the horrors and that art must at least attempt to ‘overcome the inadequacy of language’ which representing the enormous moral weight. But at the heart of all the discourse ‘is the duty to be responsible,’ historian Katherine Biber concludes in her piece Bad Holocaust Art .

Surely nobody is accusing Kang of disrespect or not being the right person for the task, but it is interesting to consider and in light of the discourse one can see just how brilliant and respectful We Do Not Part truly is. It is a brutal and bleak novel, yet ultimately we see how the friendship of the two women and their efforts to bear witness champion the human spirit and their attempts to bear witness asks us to consider how we can exist amidst atrocity and move forward with such a history of suffering without neglecting the lessons of the past and respecting the victims. This feels especially pertinent in a world where the populace often fails to learn from the past and are exploited by tyrants in order to wield power over the people and 'all power is violence over people,' as the Jesus figure states in Mikhail Bulgakov's masterpiece, The Master and Margarita. A censorship of history or refusing to allow the horrors of the past to be told under the manipulative wailings that it causes people to dislike their country is what gives atrocities the green light. To deny history is to teach subservience and having to discover the horrors of my own country only instilled anger that it was swept under the rug in shame instead of taught as a buttress against recurrence. Love is not subservience, love must be equal, free, and a catalyst of truth, and if one wishes to love their country ' exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually,' as the great James Baldwin once said.

‘Who would bury people in such a place?’

A masterpiece of a novel, We Do Not Part gives voice to the hauntings of history, the unnecessary suffering of the many at the behest of the powerful, and the spirit of humanity in times of crises and in the face of unspeakable horror. It is a slow burn that grows in intensity and glows in beauty through Kang’s poetic prose. Proving herself a worthy Nobel laureate, this is a novel that will embed in you and we are all better for it.

5/5

'I don’t want to live face down on the ground like you.'


Jeju 4.3 Peace Park, memorial for those who went missing during the Jeju Uprising.

[Taufiq Yves · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don’t want to box this book in as just a tale about the Jeju Island April 3rd Massacre. If you’re expecting a history lesson packed with facts, you might end up more confused than enlightened. Han Kang’s writing is all about the people - especially women - and it’s drenched in raw emotions. The way she paints the scene using weather, objects, and imagery really grabs you and doesn’t let go.

Instead of fixating on a “massacre of civilians,” it seems Han Kang is more interested in diving into the deep, lasting pain that survivors have had to carry. The book actually blends together 2 separate massacres in Korean history.

Potential Spoilers Ahead

It all kicks off with a dream - black trees, heavy snow, and seawater - that Han Kang actually experienced after finishing her earlier work, Human Acts, about the 1980 Gwangju Uprising. That haunting shadow follows the character Kyungha, who’s tormented by nightmares. Imagine lying in an overheated apartment, sweating through cold showers, drifting in and out of sleep while drowning in relentless, scalding nightmares. That’s how the uprising subtly weaves its way into her life.

As the story shifts into winter, Kyungha gets a call from an old friend, Inseon, who lives on Jeju Island. Inseon, having injured her finger while woodworking and now in a Seoul hospital, urgently needs help to care for her pet white bird, Ama. After battling through heavy snow and nearly impossible roads, Kyungha finally arrives at the wooden house - only to find Ama dead. This journey sets the stage for the first part of the novel, filled with Kyungha’s memories of Inseon, her rebellious past, her small but vivid family tales, and even hints of films about Vietnamese comfort women and the early days of Korean massacres.

The second part shifts into this almost surreal space between life and death. In a cabin buffeted by a blizzard, Inseon - who was supposed to be in a hospital - returns to narrate another horror: the Jeju Island Massacre (1948-1950) alongside the Korean War. 30,000 civilians died in the first year and nearly 300,000 in the second, including Inseon’s own family. These painful memories, pieced together from old newspapers, letters, and her mother Jeongsim’s fragmented recollections, build a raw tapestry of historical grief.

Then comes a brief third part that centers on a promise running throughout the book. Kyungha once mentioned to Inseon that maybe planting those dreamlike black trees and photographing their snow-covered stumps would help banish her nightmares. Inseon, already on that path, shows Kyungha the land set aside for that project. When Kyungha felt like giving up, Inseon reminded her, “But I’ve already started.” Through this long, winding narrative, it becomes clear that Inseon’s quest is really about honoring those who died under brutal, dictatorial oppression.

Looking back after finishing the book, I realized something poignant: Inseon’s desperate call for Kyungha to save the pet was already too late - the bird was dead. Just like trying to undo history, some things can’t be fixed, though at least Kyungha made sure the bird got a proper farewell. Despite years of government silence and denial, the pain of the past still lingers, with families never stopping their search for missing loved ones.

There are some truly gut-wrenching moments in the book. For example, before we even learn that Inseon’s mother was a survivor, she casually mentions keeping a saw under her mattress to fend off nightmares - a detail that later hits you with its deep symbolic pain. Then there’s that disturbing scene where a young mother, in an attempt to help her bleeding sister, bites off her own finger and forces it into her sister’s mouth - a grim image that stays with you. And later, Inseon herself has to endure having her stitched finger pricked every few minutes in the hospital, a painful reminder that sometimes, suffering is just part of being alive.

I believe Han Kang spent over 7 years crafting this book not to lay out a historical account but to capture and preserve the raw, unfiltered pain of the past. The scene where Inseon gets her finger treated struck me the most - it showed a calm, resilient strength in the midst of suffering. It reminded me that while some people might have seemingly peaceful lives, others are battling storms we never see. Life is this quiet sorrow we all endure moment by moment, and in the grand scheme of things, goodbyes and endings don’t change that. The past lingers, unforgotten.

All in all, this is a captivating book with a lasting impact. It makes you feel what it’s like for those who suffer so deeply that even breathing can hurt, yet somehow, they still find the strength to move forward.

5 / 5 stars

[emma · Rating 4 out of 5]

han kang hive...it's our time.

i found the vegetarian remarkable, but i've loved the solemn reflections on human violence that han kang has published since even more.

this book is deep and still and quiet, hugely emotional in the smallest strokes. it sneaks up on the reader in so many ways, and when i finished, i just sat with it.

it's stayed with me since.

bottom line: as exquisite as only han kang can be.

(thanks to the publisher for the e-arc)

[Roman Clodia · Rating 5 out of 5]

I remembered... everyone who's ever suffered similar fates regardless of place...
Hit with bullets.
Hit with cudgels.
Lives severed by blades.
How agonizing it must have been

What Han does in this book is articulate a harrowing story but to express it through a delicately lucid and austere prose. Strikingly, she allows this novel to take on the allusive techniques more usually found in poetry, and shows herself (again) as an exquisite craftsperson of this dense and sophisticated mode of storytelling.

The explicit story is an excavation of the Jeju 4.3 massacre of 1948 in South Korea and the trauma that has ensued on both a personal and national level. The story thematises issues of suffering, intergenerational pain and the unending nature of loss and absence, and attempts towards memorialisation as both a move towards some kind of partial healing as well as acknowledgement of history and the way the past always has a presence in our present.

But what really raises this book in my personal pantheon, is the craft. Han uses metaphors and symbolism to great effect without overloading the text. Snow, birds, trees contain a multiplicity of meanings, some of which also perform as intertexts to Han's other works. Strikingly, they also have shifting values: snow is white and pure and peaceful, even as it is a potential giveaway of a father and daughter's footsteps as they try to find refuge in a cave from the militias seeking their death. It acts as a symbol for the covering over of inconvenient history that governments seek to eradicate from memory; and it figures disappearance as material flakes hit the damp ground and dissolve, representing the absence of family relations and executed bodies thrown into the sea to be swept away. It is especially powerful as a figure for reiteration: the natural cycle of snow-water-mist and the way that reflects humanity's inability to get past violence, war and struggle: 'Who's to say the snow dusting my hands now isn't the same snow that had gathered on their faces?' This sense of haunting, of the intersection of time, is one which permeates the book.

The other system of imagery which worked so well for me is that of bloody fingers: Inseon cuts off her fingertips when working on an art installation as memorialisation piece; in the hospital a nurse has to stick needles into her open wounds in order to keep the nerves alive. But this also recalls moments of torture and also instances of love and desperation: Inseon's mother cut her own fingers to drop warm blood into her dying sister in an attempt to keep her alive, and would prick Inseon's finger with a needle and rub her belly when she had disturbed nightmares. These sorts of dualities of imagery give a gorgeous coherence to the book on a sub-textual level and involve the reader in the hermeneutics of the text.

The title, We Do Not Part in English, is both the title of the art project being contemplated within the story as a monument to the massacre but also refers to the way in which human connections endure: at the heart of the narrative is the friendship of the two women, Kyungha and Inseon, who tell this story as alternate voices with Kyungha as main narrator and Inseon as inserts, but there is also the implication of the lasting remembrance of the executed who do not disappear from personal or collective memories - and the book itself is, on one level an act of artistic recollection and memorialisation. While the immediate concern is with a specific incident in the history of Korea, there is a sense that Han is also thinking more widely of other histories of mass executions, atrocities and, possibly, genocide. Like Sebald, she widens the margins of her story to take a view on humanity's inescapable, apparently, inhumaneness - but does this through a consummate artistry that offers some kind of hope or, at least, doesn't end in complete despair.

I received an ARC of this (thank you, Penguin and Netgalley!) just days before Han was awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize for Literature and this is a fine book to introduce her to potentially new audiences.

[Guille · Rating 4 out of 5]

Recuerdo aquellas despreciables palabras de alguien a quién no nombraré por no manchar esta página: “algunos se han acordado de su padre, parece ser, cuando había subvenciones para encontrarle”. A gentuza como esta es a la que le podría venir bien la lectura de libros como este si no fuera porque estos individuos no han sido ni podrán ser nunca personas decentes.

”Después de una década de llevarlos en silencio en nuestros corazones, pronto llegará el día en el que los deudos de las víctimas podamos reencontrarnos con nuestros añorados difuntos y estos alcancen por fin el descanso eterno”

Pero si a estas alturas de la vida no podemos sorprendernos de nada de lo que un ser humano es capaz de hacerle a otro ser humano, cómo nos van a sorprender las barbaridades que puedan decir. Aun así, no podemos ni debemos mostrarnos impasibles ante ellas ni dejar de denunciarlas. Así lo cree también Han Kang que, como ya hiciera en «Actos humanos», deja aquí constancia de otra persecución y matanza atroz que se perpetró en la remota isla coreana de Jeju con el beneplácito y el estímulo de EE.UU., y de la búsqueda tiempo después por parte de sus familiares de los restos de sus muertos.

“No es casualidad que aquel invierno fueran asesinadas treinta mil personas en esta isla, y en el verano del año siguiente, otras doscientas mil en el resto del país. El gobierno militar estadounidense ordenó poner fin al comunismo a toda costa, masacrando de ser preciso a los trescientos mil habitantes que componían por aquel entonces la población de Jeju… No solo se autorizó, sino que se recompensó la atrocidad de disparar a los bebés en la cabeza, lo que hizo que ascendieran a mil quinientos los niños menores de diez amos muertos por heridas de bala”

Pero todo esto se cuenta de una forma poética y muy hermosa en la onírica (quizá no sea este el adjetivo adecuado) segunda parte, dominada por la nieve, el frío y la oscuridad, mientras que la realista primera parte transcurre en sus primeros capítulos durante un verano luminoso y ardiente. A pesar del realismo de esta primera parte, un sueño, más bien una pesadilla, es la que no deja vivir a Gyeonhga, su protagonista, (en la segunda parte es la realidad, más bien una pesadilla, la que se adentra en su sueño, o quizás sea otra cosa). En un principio, ella cree que la pesadilla está provocada por el libro que escribió sobre la matanza de Gwangju (léase «Actos humanos»), a lo que ve imposible decir adiós, aunque es posible que todo pudiera acabar si realiza una performance sobre esa pesadilla que le atormenta.

“Esas pesadillas me robaron la vida. No dejaron que quedara a mi lado ni un solo ser vivo”

Gyeonhga está sola y es víctima de una profunda depresión, no está claro si ha sido abandonada por su familia (tiene una hija) o fue ella quien la abandonó, todo esto se nos oculta, nada conocemos de su historia personal, solo sabemos de su sufrimiento actual y de su posible idea de acabar con su vida.

“… un cuerpo despojado de su caparazón que se arrastra despacio como una babosa sobre el filo de un cuchillo. Un cuerpo que desea vivir. Un cuerpo hendido y cortado. Un cuerpo que se escabulle, se abraza y se aferra. Un cuerpo que se arrodilla. Un cuerpo que ruega. Un cuerpo del que no para de supurar algo como sangre, pus o lágrimas”

De forma inesperada, recibe una llamada de Inseon, fotógrafa y antigua compañera y amiga, que la sacará de su desolación. Inseon está en el hospital recuperándose dolorosamente de unas heridas en las manos que se hizo ejerciendo su nuevo oficio de carpintera. Allí le pide que vaya sin demora a su casa y cuide de su cotorra que, sin comida ni bebida, debe estar a punto de morir. Una terrible tormenta de nieve convierte su viaje en una odisea, un viaje que la transportará muchos años atrás para descubrir, de la mano de la madre de Inseon y su familia, una muestra más de la crueldad humana en una pequeña aldea de la isla de Jeju.

[Alwynne · Rating 5 out of 5]

Han Kang’s intense, intricate narrative has the feel of a ghost story, forged from unsettling encounters with the spectres of South Korea’s turbulent past. Han opens with an eerie sequence, taken from the dreams that partly inspired her to write this. Author Kyungha – a version of Han – is living in isolation, tormented by debilitating headaches and destabilising nightmares. Recurring nightmares she attributes to the disturbing content of research undertaken for a recent book about the Gwangju uprising – similar to Han’s Human Acts. Macabre fantasies dominate Kyungha’s sleeping and, increasingly, waking thoughts. She’s unable to move freely through surrounding streets, visualising soldiers poised to swoop, intent on capturing her and inflicting searing pain. But Kyungha’s attempts to retreat from the outside world are abruptly curtailed by a summons from old friend, Inseon.

Inseon’s settled in her childhood home on Jeju Island but a serious accident’s brought her to a specialist treatment centre in Seoul. Inseon needs a favour, alone in Jeju is her small bird Ama, likely to die if Kyungha can’t reach her in time. Through blustering winds and a seemingly-incessant snowstorm, Kyungha sets out on a gruelling trek to Inseon’s house. An existential journey leading her away from the desolation of Gwangju towards the traumascape of Inseon’s Jeju. Inseon’s experiences of Jeju are shaped by her mother’s. Jeongsim, Inseon’s mother, survived what’s known as Jeju 4:3 or “Sa-Sam.” But most of her family died and her brother was disappeared.

Jeju 4:3 points to massacres that took place in April, 1948. But the killings weren’t confined to April, Jeju 4:3 encompasses atrocities that stretched back into preceding months and continued in the months ahead. A political uprising sparked by developments involving the governing of South Korea, and the policies of the US administration then overseeing it, was brutally suppressed by a grouping of soldiers, police, and right-wing militias. Ostensibly a hunt for “left-wing” guerrilla units, the underlying goal was to eradicate “leftists.” Around 30,000 people were eventually slaughtered, roughly 10% of Jeju’s population – a place considered overrun by “commie” subversives and sympathisers. During this “scorched earth” campaign whole villages were razed to the ground. No form of terror was considered too extreme, from torture to gang-rape to mass murder - victims included children and new-born babies.

The legacy of Jeju 4:3 dominates the later stages of Han’s narrative. At Inseon’s house, Kyungha’s confronted with distressing documentation compiled by Jeongsim and later added to by Inseon. And Kyungha realises the devastating scenes invading her dreams originated on Jeju. When Kyungha comes face to face with Inseon, still in Seoul yet somehow simultaneously on Jeju, the boundary between real and imagined fractures. Han interweaves surreal episodes featuring Kyungha and Inseon with extracts from the testimonies of Jeju 4:3 survivors – building on existing oral histories. Haunted individuals, they’re tortured by the knowledge that somewhere, in mass graves yet to be discovered, lie the unclaimed bodies of family members from grandfathers to grandmothers, uncles, siblings or cousins.

Although it’s fine as a standalone, Han’s narrative’s shot through with traces of earlier work. Most obviously Kyungha’s writing, and Han’s subject matter, form a bridge to Human Acts; while the symbolic use of trees and plants echoes aspects of The Vegetarian. Snow and snow-related imagery surfaces throughout – so much so it feels a little overworked at times. Han’s use of snow recalls passages from The White Book - as well as untranslated pieces set in snowy landscapes – conjuring notions of mortality and loss. But here, for Han, snow’s also intended to represent “softness and light,” tempering the “darkness” of her meditations on genocide and mass killing.

Although Han’s exploration of these topics stems from Jeju 4:3, she also references the extermination of suspected “reds” on the mainland in Busan and Daegu. But she goes beyond these too, invested in questions of what might drive humans in do barbaric things, and what distinguishes those who do from those who don’t or won’t. She’s equally interested in potential methods for addressing the past: how to heal history’s wounds: the transformation of individual mourning into a collective response possessing active political force; opportunities for solidarity and the co-creation of rituals which open up possibilities for remembrance that goes beyond gesture. Han’s comments about the novel, together with its conclusion, suggest cautious optimism. Unlike Human Acts which steered her towards despair, she found writing this cathartic.

The translation reads smoothly, although there’s not always a marked distinction between sections in Jeju dialect and those in standard Korean, the incorporation of terms of address used on Jeju offers some clues – for instance “abang” for father instead of “abeoji.” The structure and texture of the novel sometimes reminded me of Greek Lessons although it’s more collage-like. Austere, understated prose is interrupted by bursts of arresting lyricism, oneiric sequences are juxtaposed with sharply-focused, docu-style accounts. Although it wasn’t a problem for me, I think the pacing might be an issue for some. The novel took Han several years to complete. The first half initially appeared in serial form in a quarterly magazine, as a result some elements may seem slightly repetitive, excessively detailed, and/or drawn-out compared to the rest of the book. Personally, I found the rhythm of the earlier sections hypnotic. I liked Han’s willingness to experiment, even when I didn’t think it quite paid off. But overall, I found this immensely powerful and incredibly compelling. Translated by e. yaewon & Paige Aniyah Morris.

Thanks to Netgalley and publisher Hamish Hamilton for the ARC

[Candi · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Life was exceedingly vulnerable, I realized. The flesh, the organs, bones, breaths passing before my eyes all held within them the potential to snap, to cease – so easily, and by a single decision.”

I can’t think of any better way to describe this book than to say it was haunting. Both the surreal and the disturbing images are right there in front of me still, whether my eyes are open or closed. It’s odd, but as I sit here I realize that I can’t quite picture Kyungha, the narrator, or Inseon, her friend. Yet everything else is so vivid. Perhaps Kyungha and Inseon are a bit otherworldly. Part of a dream. One that the reader finds herself inside of. Kyungha is also unsure of that blurred line between reality and dream, or maybe nightmare would be a better word for it.

“In the sudden lull, I feel as if I’ve opened the door to a dream within a dream and stepped inside.”

“I say quietly, Dreams are terrifying things. No – they’re humiliating. They reveal things about you that you weren’t even aware of…”

After an injury lands her in the hospital, Inseon makes a request of Kyungha. She asks her to travel to her home on the island of Jeju to feed and water her bird, Ama, before it is too late. Kyungha makes her way there amid a snowstorm. At this point, the snow plays a major role in the story, both in a literal and figurative way. The story alternates between the present moment when Kyungha is at Inseon’s home and in the past. A horror that is a deeply disturbing part of Korean history is slowly revealed in a very personal way. The images mix and mingle with the present time. The crimes and injustices of the past are wound tightly with the here and now. They become a part of us, whether we want them to or not.

“Snow had an unreality to it. Was this because of its pace or its beauty? There was an accompanying clarity to snow as well, especially slow, drifting snow. What was and wasn’t important were made distinct. Certain facts became chillingly apparent. Pain, for one.”

We Do Not Part is simultaneously a story of a loving friendship and the chilling aftereffects of the unspeakable acts that humans are capable of doing to one another. Let’s not ignore the fact that these actions happened in recent history. We most certainly are not immune to committing such violence now. As much as it might seem easier to keep one’s head in the sand, we can’t afford to do so. History tells us this repeatedly.

This is my second Han Kang novel and I’ve no doubt she’s well deserving of the Nobel Prize in Literature. Her prose soars and her subject matter is relevant, highly compelling and deeply revealing of human nature in its various forms – both the good and the evil. I felt a little less grounded while reading this novel compared to my experience with The Vegetarian. Yet, it’s an important book and one that I can highly recommend.

“How does one endure it?
Without a fire raging in one’s chest.
Without a you to return to and embrace.”

[Paul Fulcher · Rating 5 out of 5]

People say 'light as snow'. But snow has its own heft, which is the weight of this drop of water.
People say 'light as a bird'. But birds too have their weight.

눈처럼 가볍다고 사람들은 말한다. 그러나 눈에도 무게가 있다, 이 물방울만큼.
새처럼 가볍다고도 말한다. 하지만 그것들에게도 무게가 있다.

From the deserving winner of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life.

We Do Not Part (2025) is the translation by e. yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris of 작별하지 않는다 by 한강 (Han Kang), and a book that epitomises the prose and themes that led the Nobel Committee to choose here as the new Nobel lauraete (see below for their more detailed take).

This novel won the Prix Médicis étranger for its French translation and the English version must be a strong contender for a double-win for Han Kang in the International Booker. [Postscript - bizarrely it didn't even make the longlist!]

I think of (although I'm less clear the author does) the novel as part of a trilogy linked by trauma, and by images of snow, with the powerful 소년이 온다 (2014), translated as Human Acts (2016) by Deborah Smith and the exquisitely poetic 흰 (2016), translated by Smith as The White Book (2017).

This novel was also originally going to be a short-story, the third of a a 'Snow Trilogy' with the two short stories, yet to appear in English, 눈 한 송이가 녹는 동안 (2015) ['While A Snowflake Melts'] and 작별 (2018) ['Farewell'], as the narrator of this novel comments:

I'd written a story titled 'Farewell', a story about a woman of snow who melts away under sleet. But that can't be my actual, final farewell.

Han Kang herself has described this book as 지극한 사랑에 대한 소설 - a novel about profound love, and one that followed on from her experience after writing 소년이 온다 (Human Acts) as explained in the autobiographical opening to We Do Not Part.

We Do Not Part is narrated by Kyungha (경하), a novelist, and the initial sections follow the author's own biography. Kyungha, like the author, completed a novel in 2014 based on the massacre that followed the May 18, 1980 Gwangju uprising ('오일팔' as the events are simply known in Korea, i.e. May 18), in 한강's case 소년이 온다 / Human Acts. But far from purging each of visions of violence they were haunted by further dreams:

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?

학살과 고문에 대해 쓰기로 마음먹었으면서, 언젠가 고통을 뿌리칠 수 있을 거라고, 모든 흔적들을 손쉽게 여읠 수 있을 거라고, 어떻게 나는 그토록 순진하게-뻔뻔스럽게-바라고 있었던 것일까?

For both Kyungha, and 한강, this took the form of a very specific visual image, which opens the novel:

Sparse snow was falling.

I stood on flat land that edged up a low hill. Along the brow of this hill and down its visible face to the seam of the plain, thousands of black tree trunks jutted from the earth. They varied in height, like a crowd of people ranging in age, and were about as thick as railway sleepers, though nowhere near as straight. Stooped and listing, they gave the impression of a thousand men, women and haggard children huddling in the snow.

Was this a graveyard? I wondered. Are these gravestones?

I walked past the torsos – treetops lopped off, exposed cross sections stippled with snowflakes that resembled salt crystals; I passed the prostrating barrows behind them. My feet stilled as I noticed the sensation of water underfoot. That’s strange, I thought. Within moments the water was up to my ankles. I looked back. What I saw astonished me: the far horizon turned out to be the shoreline. And the sea was crashing in.

The words tumbled from my lips: Who would bury people in such a place?

She realises that this image isn't of Gwangju, and over time it leads her to another infamous massacre earlier in Korea's post World War II history, in the aftermath of the Jeju uprising on April 3, 1940 (제주 4·3 사건), with up to 30,000, men, women and children, slaughtered by the US-backed mainland government forces, around 10% of the population, and a similar number fleeing to Japan.

In Korea this story was largely supressed during the military dictatorship, and the first literary treatment was in the 1978 novel 순이삼촌 by 현기영 (Hyun Ki-youn) - Aunt Suni or Sun-i Samch'on in its English translations - which at the time it was published led to censorship and punishment of the author. There is a strong nod to this work when Kyungha's friend Inseon (인선) explains how to converse with Jeju people:

Inseon had told me to address older people here as samchun. Only outsiders say ajossi or ajumoni, halmoni or haraboji, she said. If you start off by calling them samchun, even if you can't string together a sentence in Jeju-mal, they're likely to be less guarded, thinking you've lived on the island for a good while.

The other key character in the story is Inseon, a colleague from Kyungha's first job, like the author as a reporter at a magazine, over time a close friend, and an artist and film maker.

The novel rather jumps around in time but we learn than Inseon and Kyungha had conceived of an art-project which would be hosted on some land in the mountains of Jeju which Inseon had inherited, where they would replicate Kyungha's vision by planting one hundred black logs to resemble, and remember, those who lost their lives in 1948:

I wanted to ask you – what if we did something about it together? I asked Inseon. What if you and I were to plant logs in a field, dress them in black ink and film them under falling snow?

Well, we’d have to get started before autumn ends, Inseon answered after listening to all I had to say. She was dressed in the black hanbok of mourning, her chin-length hair tied back with a white rubber band and her face earnest and composed. She said to plant ninety-nine logs in a field, we had to be sure the ground wasn’t frozen. She suggested we gather people to help with the planting by mid November at the latest, and said we could use the abandoned tract of land she’d inherited from her father, which no one used. Does the ground freeze here too? I asked. Of course, the uplands are frozen throughout the winter, she said.


A memorial in the village of Bukchon, the real-life inspiration for the fictional village where the events of 순이삼촌 / Sun-i Samch'on are set

Crucially Inseon's family home is away from the coast, as during October 1948 the government/mainland authorities decreed: “We impose quarantine on the area further inland than 5km from the coastline of Jeju Island and in the mountainous area from October 20 to the end of military action to sweep the unpatriotic extremists who committed unpardonable atrocities hiding in Mt. Halla”, with those in the interior subject to military action and execution. As explained here, "of the 82 mid-mountain villages that existed at the time of Jeju 4·3, 35 had 100 or more residents killed."

But the right time to complete the project never quite comes, and Kyungha decides to abandon it, the two friends drifting apart. However, one December day she receives a simple text message from Inseon that simply reads Kyunghaya (경하야), the 'ya' a suffix used with close acquaintances. Inseon is in a hospital in Seoul, having severed her fingers in an accident in her Jeju studio, and asks Kyungha to visit her urgently.

It transpires that Inseon had been continuing with the project, indeed the accident came while working on the wood. She was rushed to hospital on the mainland for an operation to reattach her fingers, and she is desparate for Kyungha to go, that very day, to Inseon's Jeju home to feed the remaining one of her two pet birds, who she is convinced will not last another day without water and food.

Travelling to Jeju, Kyungha is caught in a snowstorm, which, give the journey involves the airport bus around the island to, what I think is the south-east of the island near to Pyoseon Beach, followed by a local bus inland to the mid-slopes of Hallasan, and then a further trek which would take 30 minutes at the best of times, places her trip in some jeopardy, and indeed during the final leg of the journey she falls down a slope, losing consciousness briefly:

This path I’ve landed on and slipped down by accident, this bed of earth in which I am lying, is most likely the dried-up stream. A thin layer of ice must have set over its channel, a pile of snow heaped up over that. There are hardly any rivers or creeks on this volcanic island, and only occasionally during heavy rains or heavy snow do flowing streams appear. The village used to be divided along the border of this ephemeral stream, Inseon once told me on a walk. A cluster of forty houses, give or take, had stood on the other side, and when the evacuation orders went out in 1948, they were all set on fire, the people in them slaughtered, the village incinerated.

She eventually recovers (or at least the novel narrates that she does) and finds Inseon's home, only to find that the bird she has come to save has already passed away, and she buries it, with the snow still falling heavily in the garden.

But the next day, when she awakens late in the afternoon, the bird seems to be back - and then she is also visited by Inseon, who she factually knows can not be there as she is still in the hospital - and who discusses the project with her:

Scooping the contents of a container out and into the kettle with a wooden spoon, Inseon asked, What are we calling it? Our project.
She turned to me, smiling as she poured bottled water into the kettle. I realized I'd never asked, she said.
We Do Not Part, I answered.
Approaching me with the kettle and two mugs in her hands, Inseon echoed the words. We Do Not Part.

In the rush of air coming through the open rear and front doors, we could see the flames surge higher inside the vents. Inseon set the kettle on the stove, which was now bright red from the heat.
With a sound like sand sifting, beads of water rolled off the kettle and instantly turned to steam.
We sat without speaking, without facing each other. Only when we heard the water at the bottom of the kettle start to boil did Inseon break the silence.
As in we refuse to part by refusing to say goodbye, or as in we actually don't part ways?
There was still no steam coming out of the kettle. We had to wait a little longer for the water to boil.
Is it somehow incomplete, the parting?
The steam began escaping from the kettle spout like a skein of white thread. The attached lid began clattering open and shut.
Is it deferred? The goodbye - or the closure?
Indefinitely?
Outside the front door, the underbrush of the woods had turned almost black. The tree stumps - now covered in snow, their contours made round and powdery - shone faintly in the twilight.

The second half of the novel takes on a dream-like quality as Kyung-ha is led by Inseon through various memories and archives of her family's history and the events in Jeju, which took place when Inseon's mother was 13:

She told me about how, when she was young, soldiers and police had murdered everyone in her village. My mum had been in her last year of elementary school and my aunt was seventeen. The two of them had been away on an errand at a distant cousin’s house, which was how they managed to avoid the same fate. The next day, having heard the news, the sisters returned to the village and wandered the grounds of the elementary school all afternoon. Searching for the bodies of their father and mother, their older brother and eight year old sister. They looked over the bodies that had fallen every which way on top of one another and found that, overnight, a thin layer of snow had covered and frozen upon each face. They couldn’t tell anyone apart because of the snow, and since my aunt couldn’t bring herself to brush it away with her bare hands, she used a handkerchief to wipe each face clean. [...] That day, she came to understand something clearly. That when people died, their bodies went cold. Snow remained on their cheeks, and a thin layer of bloody ice set over their faces.

Inseon's great-uncle was arrested and then lost in the prison system, likely executed at the Gyeongsan Cobalt Mine (경산 코발트광산 학살 사건) although rumours persisted of escapees, and Inseon's mother went on to marry someone who did survive imprisonment. Inseon's mother also led a campaign to discover what happened to those caught up in the events, and her archives, which we explore with Kyungha and Inseon, also speak to events such as the 1950 Bodo League massacre (보도연맹 학살), with Inseon's own films covering other atrocities, including those inflicted by Korean troops in Vietnam.

But at the heart of the story is the profound love which the author highlights of Inseon's mother for her family and between the two friends. And the symbolism of the snow:

The snow that fell over this island and also in other ancient, faraway places could all have condensed together inside those clouds. When, at five years old, I reached out to touch my first snow in G—, and when, at thirty, I was caught in a sudden rain shower that left me drenched as I biked along the riverside in Seoul, when the snow obscured the faces of the hundreds of children, women and elders on the schoolyard here on Jeju seventy years ago, when muddy water flooded the chicken coop as hens and baby chicks flapped their wings and rain ricocheted off the gleaming brass pump — who's to say those raindrops and crumbling snow crystals and thin layers of bloodied ice are not one and the same, that the snow settling over me now isn't that very water?

Another powerful work from an author now recognised, via the Nobel, as one of the world's finest living writers.

Thanks to the publisher via Netgalley for the ARC

From the author's Nobel Prize speech

In the notebook I kept while working on that book, I made these notes:

Life seeks to live. Life is warm.
To die is to grow cold. To have snow settle over one’s face rather than melt.
To kill is to make cold.

Humans in history and humans in the cosmos.
The wind and the ocean currents. The circular flow of water and air that connects the
entire world. We are connected. I pray that we are connected.

The novel is made up of three parts. If the first part is a horizontal journey that follows the narrator, Kyungha, from Seoul to her friend Inseon’s home in the Jeju uplands through heavy snow towards the pet bird she has been tasked with saving, then the second part follows a vertical path that leads Kyungha and Inseon down to one of humanity’s darkest nights — to the winter of 1948 when civilians on Jeju were slaughtered — and into the ocean’s depths. In the third and final part, the two light a candle at the bottom of the sea.

Though the novel is pulled forwards by the two friends, just as they take turns holding the candle, its true protagonist and the person linked to both Kyungha and Inseon is Inseon’s mother, Jeongsim. She who, having survived the massacres on Jeju, has fought to recover even a fragment of her loved one’s bones so that she can hold a proper funeral. She who refuses to stop mourning. She who bears pain and stands against oblivion. Who does not bid farewell. In attending to her life, which had for so long seethed with pain and love of an equal density and heat, I think the questions I was asking were these: To what extent can we love? Where is our limit? To what degree must we love in order to remain human to the end?

From the Nobel Committee's bio-bibliography

Another highlight is the late work, 작별하지 않는다 (“We Do Not Part”) from 2021, which in terms of its imagery of pain is closely connected to The White Book. The story unfolds in the shadow of a massacre that took place in the late 1940s on South Korea’s Jeju Island, where tens of thousands of people, among them children and the elderly, were shot on suspicion of being collaborators. The book portrays the shared mourning process undertaken by the narrator and her friend Inseon, who both, long after the event, bear with them the trauma associated with the disaster that has befallen their relatives. With imagery that is as precise as it is condensed, Han Kang not only conveys the power of the past over the present, but also, equally powerfully, traces the friends’ unyielding attempts to bring to light what has fallen into collective oblivion and transform their trauma into a joint art project, which lends the book its title. As much about the deepest form of friendship as it is about inherited pain, the book moves with great originality between the nightmarish images of the dream and the inclination of witness literature to speak the truth.

[Henk · Rating 5 out of 5]

Han Kang is the master of the sledgehammer blow and this time takes us into Korean history and a massacre on the island of Jeju, where 30.000 people died in the 1940s. Snow is perpetually falling, people are silent and nightmares recur while human lives seem as fragile as bird's hearts
Why is the world so violent and painful?
And yet how can the world be this beautiful?
From the Nobel prize lecture: https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/20...

An author, seemingly loosely modelled on Han Kang as writer of Human Acts, has recurring dreams about graves close to the sea, under barren trees covered by snow. We Do Not Part starts of dark and atmospheric, with oppressive heat in Seoul and the aftermath of a divorce. People feel unmoored in the novel, and there is little true connection, with the main character always responsible for arranging breakfast and dinner for her family, even while working and writing a novel. It is an interesting segway into autofiction for the author.

Our main character, Kyungha, visits a documentary maker annex carpenter on Jeju, Inseon, who had an accident with a circle saw. Being pricked every three minutes, day or night, the bloody scenes in the hospital are only a runway to a stark, if poetic portrayal of more horrors. Kyungha travels to Jeju, the scene of a massacre (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeju_up...) and a snow storm. Her travels feel both like Inferno by Dante Alighieri, in how hell is seemingly a cold place with ever falling snow, and also reminded me in a sense of 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World by Elif Shafak in setting.

The way Han Kang brings the dead to life is incredible. Wrenching scenes of kids of 12 and 16 wiping the snow mixed with blood from faces of corpses to find loved ones, people being executed in groups of ten to empty prisons, a scene where a young girl seems unharmed but is actually pierced through the chin by a bullet; intensely grim exactly because they are not fictitious.
The writing reminds us how desensitised we are for big numbers and headlines in the news, and how impressive how newly minted Nobel Laureate Han Kang manages to make these kind of events personal, claustrophobic and yet also in a sense healing.

Very impressive and probably together with Human Acts my favourite novel of the author I have read. I can't put it better than the author herself what an ode this is to human resilience and also a charge against what humans can do against each other:
... its true protagonist and the person linked to both Kyungha and Inseon is Inseon’s mother, Jeongsim. She who, having survived the massacres on Jeju, has fought to recover even a fragment of her loved one’s bones so that she can hold a proper funeral. She who refuses to stop mourning. She who bears pain and stands against oblivion. Who does not bid farewell. In attending to her life, which had for so long seethed with pain and love of an equal density and heat, I think the questions I was asking were these: To what extent can we love? Where is our limit? To what degree must we love in order to remain human to the end?

[Maxwell · Rating 4 out of 5]

[4.5 stars] One could say We Do Not Part is an amalgam of Han Kang’s previous works: the surrealism of The Vegetarian, the examination of traumatic historical events in Human Acts, and the poetic starkness of The White Book. Here she dips into autofiction and shines a light on the atrocities committed on Jeju Island in 1948.

The book begins with a dream. Evoking woodcut prints, the white snow falls on bent and blackened tree stumps evoking the image of human form. The dark sea rolls in, threatening the trees (or are they people?) as Kyungha, our narrator, anxiously watches. She awakens to a sweltering day in Seoul, a sharp contrast in both weather and mood. Her nightmares have haunted her since she began researching a book she published four years prior about an uprising that resulted in countless deaths. But she feels unsure if these dreams are connected to that event, or something else...

Kyungha's longtime friend Inseon texts her asking for help, immediately. She's in a hospital in Seoul after an accidental while woodworking, coincidentally on a project the two had conceived together years ago but never saw to fruition. Inseon asks Kyungha to return to her Jeju Island home to feed her pet bird who was left behind in the wake of Inseon's accident. Kyungha arrives on the island in the midst of a snowstorm that obscures not only her vision but the story's grasp on reality. From there we move into an almost dreamlike state with the characters as past and present unfold together, woven into a tale that attempts to illuminate and reflect on the harsh realities of their nation.

Kang has explored the human body throughout her oeuvre. She seems to have a fixation on how the human form can both bring forth life and quickly snatch it away. The remnants of humans lost to acts of violence permeate this story. But so too do the shallow breaths, the radiant heat from blushed cheeks, the crunch of snow under feet. These vivid images pull the reader along, like stills in a slideshow.

There also seems to be a fascination with recording history, a theme I notice popping up in many novels I've read in the last year or so. From newspaper clippings, documentary films, journal entries, letters, and novels (such as this one), there's an attempt through the characters, and seemingly Kang herself, to put a pin in history in some way. To fix the eye on something we so easily can look away from, or refuse to ever see at all. Many times our narrator forces herself to look, at wounded fingers, unfathomable separations, in the name of remembering.

At one point a character says something about love being an agony. That to love is to make oneself vulnerable: physically, emotionally, spiritually. And yet there seems to be no other option. Humans continually seek out love in all its various forms. Those are on display here: from mother and daughter, to brother and sister, friend to friend. The partings we experience in life don't seem to be as tangible as they feel. Perhaps there's something more threading us together, across time and space, through history and the present, in blood and snow.

[Eylül Görmüş · Rating 5 out of 5]

Of beni -bir kez daha- mahvettin Han Kang. Güney Koreli yazar son kitabı Veda Etmiyorum'da tıpkı Çocuk Geliyor'daki gibi ülkesinin karanlık bir dönemine bakıyor, hatta bence bu kitabı Çocuk Geliyor'un üstüne okumalı zira metin, o kitabı yazdığı dönemde yaşadıklarını anlatmasıyla başlıyor.

İnsanı okurken tüketen, içinden canını çeken bu kitapları yazarken Kang ne hale geliyor acaba diye düşünüyordum, sorunun cevabını da alıyoruz bu kitapla. Yaşanmış onca vahşeti, dökülen onca kanı, ölen çocukları, katledilen insanları yazmak için araştırma yapar ve sonra onlardan edebiyat devşirirken sahiden sağlığından feragat ediyor, ruhunun bir kısmını teslim ediyormuş.

Bu kitapta da benzer bir şey yaşanmış olmalı, zira olağanüstü acıklı bir hikaye okuyoruz. Yazar bu kez bizi 1948'e, Jeju ayaklanmasına götürüyor. 14 ila 60 bin kişinin Komünist olmak suçlamasıyla öldürüldüğü bir ayaklanma bu, kitabı okuyana kadar bilmiyordum, öğrenmiş oldum.

Günümüzde başlayan hikaye, anlatıcımızın yakın arkadaşı İnson'un kendi anne ve babasının geçmişini araştırırken memleketi Jeju Adası'nın tarihini kazımaya başlaması ve bizzat kendi ebeveynlerinin bu kanlı katliamdan paylarına düşeni aldıklarını öğrenmesiyle geçmişe uzanıyor. Anlatıcımız, İnson ve onun annesinin, üç kadının gözünden bakıyoruz tarihe ve zamanın dibine, dibine, dibine doğru iniyoruz Han Kang'ın rehberliğinde. Geçmişle bugünü öyle bir birbirine ilmekliyor ki, üzerinden geçen 80 senede olayın dehşetinin bir gram azalmadığını iliklerinde hissediyor insan okurken. İlmeklediği şey sadece geçmişle bugün değil; rüyayla gerçek, hafızayla unutulma, travmayla sevgi. Bir arada var olabilen, birbirini yanlışlamayan aksine mümkün kılan şeyler. Ölü çocukların yerine inadına yaşatılan çocuklar. Zayıf, yenik gözüken insanların sabırlı mücadeleleri. Ne çok, ne çok şey var bu romanda.

Ve tabii kar… Bu romanı kışın karlar altında okumalıydım belki ama Han Kang öyle atmosferik yazıyor ki, nerede, ne koşulda okursanız okuyun içinde bulunduğunuz odaya zaten yağacak o kar, tenimde hissettim resmen o bitmeyen kar tanelerini.

Çok, çok, çok iyi bir roman Veda Etmiyorum. Han Kang da çağımızın en büyük yazarlarından biri bence.

[David · Rating 2 out of 5]

As will be obvious from the star rating, this did not work for me. The novel has had much greater success with most readers. I found it just okay.

I have nothing but praise for Kang's decision to grapple with the difficult and important subject matter: wartime violence, genocide, cultural destruction, generational trauma, open-ended family loss. Nor will I criticize a Nobel prize-winner's individual style. However, this application of a hazy, poetic narrative to harrowing themes was enervating rather than stimulating.

Truth be told, I was bored much of the time. And the author herself gives voice to my feelings toward the end of the book:

I don't want to open it... No one can force me to wade through those pages. I am under no obligation to comply. But my trembling hands reach out and open the book. I turn page after page.

Snow. Birds. Trees. Snow. Blood. Birds. Trees. Snow.

2.5 stars

[Magdalena Miękińska (getbooky) · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5

[Fionnuala]

This book is full of shadows, the after-images of shadows, and the memories those after-images leave in the mind.

In preparation for a 21st century documentary about the massacre of hundreds of men, women, and children on the mountainous island of Jeju in South Korea in the 1950s, a documentarist sets up her camera to check the lighting and acoustics for the space she's chosen for a reading of a decades-old testimony from someone who witnessed one of the massacres.

Quite by accident, the sun casts the wavering shadow of a tree's branches onto the wall behind her. The camera picks up the flickering shadows perfectly but the documentarist herself, who is reading out the testimony, is almost completely out of the frame, and the words that are recorded are accompanied only by those wavering shadows.

That's only one of the delicate scenes in this book about two women in the 21st century who are searching for ways to commemorate the victims of the Jeju atrocities as well as honour the testimony of those who witnessed such events or who witnessed the after-shadow of the carnage, having arrived on the devastating scenes agonizingly but mercifully late.

As you might imagine, bearing witness for the witnesses is a traumatic process for the two women concerned. One of them eventually becomes a victim of the witness-bearing, and the other arrives agonizingly late to rescue what her friend holds most dear.

Like the camera angle that had swung off-centre in the documentary scene described earlier, the 21st century part of this story itself veers off on a slant. Distinct details move out of the frame, the time and the place, who may be alive and who may be dead. The two women, so engaged with their project in the morning light of the early chapters, become but flickering candlelight shadows to one another in the later ones—just as the lost family members became shadows for the survivors of the massacres, and just as those survivors in turn became inaccessible shadows for the people with whom they tried to make new lives.

I think Han Kang has found a very effective and poetic way to address the almost impossible task of bearing witness for the witnesses, to echo Jewish poet Paul Celan's line: "No one bears witness for the witness".

While reading this Han Kang book, I re-read a short book I've owned for years, Entretien dans la montagne (Conversation on the Mountain), a prose-poem by Celan about a possible meeting on a mountain path with his fellow Jew, Theodor Adorno.
In real life, the two had disagreed about Adorno's famous statement that "to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric", though I believe Adorno recanted that later.

Celan's prose-poem is full of silence and flickering shadows, shadows from the sun and shadows from candlelight, and the two people who meet on the mountain path to discuss the trauma of being survivors, were never in fact present: they met only in Celan's mind.

But in the silence of my mind, Han Kang's and Paul Celan's books have really had a meeting, and I've been a witness to their conversation. I'm still reeling from the impact of all that witnessing.

[Trevor · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is, of course, stupid to say this of someone who writes in a language you cannot read other than in translation, and a language so linguistically distant from your own, but this woman writes the most beautiful prose. As others have said, it is almost poetic. And yet, always simple, always heartbreakingly honest, always confronting.

This is a stunning novel – and while I would dearly love to provide you with all of the spoilers I can think of, I’m not going to do that. Other than to say that she smashes together the universal and the particular in ways that take your breath away. The universal being the extermination of ‘reds’, or rather ‘could be reds’, and the obligations of friendship. If this was all this book was, it would still be a masterpiece – but it is this and so much more. There are images in this that will haunt you long after you have finished it. To me, her hiding the blood stains – and the hiding of presumed reds – is beyond clever, poignant to the point of nearly stopping you from reading on. Masterful.

One of the things I find so utterly fascinating about her writing – and this has been true of the three books I’ve now read of hers – is how remarkably tactile they are. From the agony of dismemberment to the touch of a bird’s talons upon your finger – I can’t think of another writer who makes me feel so much while I am reading them. And I guess I mean feel in all senses – but literally feel the touch of another is what I actually meant to say. This heightened tactile sense is everywhere. Honestly, you would think the books were written by a blind person.

There are images in this – particularly of snow – that are deeply moving. And then, what you might take to be a simple description suddenly becomes a remarkable metaphor and then transforms into a major theme of the novel itself. Like I said, this is just masterful writing.

For years now, ever since I went to see Pina Bausch’s Carnations, I’ve been a bit obsessed with the idea of repetition. Repetition is never a repeating of the same – or rather, even when it is, it never means the same across its repetitions. This book ‘draws together all of the threads’ it is composed of, not least in its images. You could spend a year unpacking these and that would be a year well spent.

Just gorgeous. Yeah, sorry, you’re probably going to have to read this one. I don’t want to spoil it for you – but this is as much a book about ghosts as it is about the living. It is also about the obligations we have for things we didn’t intend – or rather that we warned others not to do, but when they are damaged by those things we had put into their heads, we retain a responsibility, despite our having warned them not to do what they subsequently did. I know, that is too vague and too smart – but I hope you’ll understand what I mean once you have read the book. We do not part – none of us ultimately part.

[Flo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating author. Han Kang writes about the impact of massacres with the same authenticity with which Svetlana Alexievich gathers testimonies about tragedies. There are also other connections with her previous works here. That’s why I would recommend starting the journey into Han Kang’s world somewhere else.

[Darren · Rating 5 out of 5]

Masterpiece alert!

I'd never heard of Han Kang. I got a random email about the booker prize and her name was mentioned. So I ordered 2 books from the library believing that I'd probably be disappointed as I find that critically acclaimed novels tend to disappoint. However, yesterday I read "The Vegetarian" and was blown away by the dreamlike narrative.

And today I read this novel. I've just finished and I'm struggling to think about how I can word this review. The synopsis of the book barely touches on what the novel is actually about. There are 200 pages of history found without these pages that are terrifying, gut wrenching and difficult to read.

As with "The Vegetarian" there is a beautiful dreamlike quality to the writing. There's so much ambiguity going on where I believe a few re-reads would help.

So it turns out Han Kang is now officially a favourite of mine

[emily · Rating 5 out of 5]

‘That is how death avoided me. Like an asteroid thought to be on a collision course avoids Earth by a hair’s breadth, hurtling past at a furious velocity that knows neither regret nor hesitation. I had not reconciled with life, but I had to resume living.’

Update : Sept/Oct 2024
Read the English translation finally, and have to bump this one up to a 5*. I was ready for the text to be somewhat 'simplified' (which to me, would compromise some of its 'beauty'), but the translator(s) was so incredibly sensitive in the handling of the text, and ever so meticulous and careful with the syntax, style and diction. It didn’t feel ‘reduced’; it felt ‘elevated’. It demands future re-readings.

‘It was early November and the tall maple trees were ablaze and glimmering in the sunlight. Beauty—but the wiring inside me that would sense beauty was dead or failing. One morning, the first frost of the season covered the half-frozen earth—Brittle autumn leaves as big as young faces tumbled past me, and the limbs of the suddenly denuded plane trees, as their Korean name of buhzeum—flaking skin—suggests, resembled grey-white flesh stripped raw.’

‘—in the areas where the conifers and subtropical broadleaf trees grew together, the wind created an indescribable harmony as it passed through the branches and leaves, its speed and rhythm varying by the type of tree. Sunlight reflected off the lustrous camellia leaves, whose angles shifted from moment to moment. Vines of maple-leaf mountain yam wound around the cryptomeria trunks and climbed them to distant heights, swaying like swing ropes.’

As I was reading this I was also 'reunited' with a friend that I lost touch with for more/less a couple of years which felt like an eternity considering how close we are. The uncanny lies in the moment I (I meant the plane) 'landed' in the country she was in (a fact I wasn't aware of at the time), she instantly reached out to me even though I've not been responding to her texts. When we finally met up (on a later visit), I said I didn't keep in touch because '(adj.) hurt people (verb) hurt', and I didn't like the idea of being a negative presence in her life. Among other lovely things, she replied with something so tender, 'my love for you is unconditional, you know’ (debatably a cliché, but from the right person, it truly hits different). At first I fail to find resonance in Han Kang's portrayal of 'friendship' but the more I read the text, the more things change (or rather, I am the one who is changed).

‘Since that evening, Inseon and I have been friends. We went through all our life milestones together, right up until she moved back to the island—messaging me at odd moments to tell me she was dropping by. Just do one thing for me? Let me in. And when I did, she would bring her arms around my shoulders, along with a rush of cold wind and the smell of cigarettes—It feels as though invisible snowflakes fill the space between us. As though the words we’ve swallowed are being sealed in between their myriad melded arms.’

‘On the black screen, sporadic points of radiance appeared like ghosts and briefly shimmered: flashes emitted by distant ocean creatures. Occasionally these bioluminescent organisms came into full view on camera, only to emerge back into obscurity. The vertical stretch of sea where the points of light gleamed grew increasingly short. The solid opaque expanse that intersected with it grew overwhelmingly vast. After a while I wondered if the dark was all that remained, but then the camera captured the translucent glow of a giant phantom jellyfish amid what looked like.'

Throughout this year, I was unserious-ly reading books about death and alike without even realising that someone hold dear to heart would have to become so unreachable so suddenly. It's strange to phrase it like so, but I recall strolling the city streets hazy-mindedly in the quiet, too-early mornings (a place I've never been to properly except for when 'transiting flights' which counts for nought in terms of being familiar with it) with another friend who I too hold very close to heart. And he said something to me like 'no offence to the people before, but no 'death' would feel as much or mean as much as this one'. I told him my sentiments echoed his.

One day I'm making another (mutual) friend tear up from guilt from having kept an important secret/info from me (even though he was being a perfectly good friend to another by having done so), the next made him laugh madly when he tells me about how someone we knew from back in school was being inappropriate about a certain matter. I (for a lack of a better phrase) 'understood the mission', and was like don't worry I felt it coming and have very recently asked some to sort it/her out. And I wondered if I was being too 'petty'? But he told me I have every right to be 'petty'. But what does it mean to be ‘petty’ or over-sensitive? Why are we made to think that being sterile, deliberately ignorant, and the ‘no fucks given’ mask is better? Sure I’m being biased and subjective about this, but maybe Han Kang’s ‘novel’ already contains those sentiments in the narrative — tucked in the waves of reverberating tones of histories, memories and raw human feelings. But I was blinded to it, not sensitive to it before because I didn’t carry the same heart I have during my earlier readings of the text.

Neither I nor my previously mentioned friends have headbutted a tree so far, so at least none of us has gone full-Heathcliff. Heathcliff is not just a character, but an entire vibe. In the second half of Brönte’s novel, he is truly ‘grief’ personified. I don’t think anyone who has a similarly ‘dark’ humour can appreciate the magnum opus (or rather just Heathcliff) fully. Another reason her work came to mind was because of how the setting sort of paralleled Han Kang's in terms of isolation, oppression, violence, and among other/more similarities, surely the winter landscapes. Anton Hur said something once along the lines of how some books ‘choose’ you at the right time. While I think ‘timing’ is a sadistic fuck far too often, I would like to believe Han Kang’s book did somehow chose me (for better or worse; but I think for ‘better’ whatever better entails/means) in a similar way that Brönte’s did when I was a clueless child of nine or ten. And in a similar way — I feel Han Kang feels the same way about W.G. Sebald softly altering her trajectory of life as a writer and as a person.

‘—pine-nut juk—I took my time with the unduly hot bowl of rice porridge—people walked past the window in bodies that looked fragile enough to shatter. Life was exceedingly vulnerable, I realised. The flesh, organs, bones, breaths passing before my eyes all held within them the potential to snap, to cease—.’

‘The twilight pouring into the woods—darkness grew, the more vividly the vents in the wood-burning stove glowed red. I don’t know why he hid his illness from me—Inseon started at the bright holes, as if staring hard enough at those gleaming eyes would make words flow out of the stove like molten iron.

We haven’t parted ways, not yet.’

—————————————————————————

If one can look at a work of literary translation as a transportation of vibes as playfully(?) preached (and also accomplished) by the wonderful Jeremy Tiang (Beijing Sprawl), then I would like for my review to be mostly about vibes (if I can manage that). So I’m starting it all off with this mini playlist below— a little sonic curation to go with my reviews, why not? In any case, reading this has been the most desperate and chaotic way I’ve ever ‘tried’ to read a book/novel, so it would only be appropriate to explain my experience of it all with something as closely desperate and chaotic as possible.

Old Town - Say Sue Me
Pearl Diver - Mitski
Iota - Angel Olsen

Han Kang’s historical fiction (I dislike this term, but will have to settle for the low-hanging fruit for now; you’ll know why I’m not a fan of the term if you like Labatut too) depicts the aftermath/fallout of the Jeju uprising, or rather and simply, the Jeju massacre. About 10% (30,000) of Jeju’s population was killed, and approximately 15% of the survivors left to find refuge in Japan. Without a doubt a difficult thing to write about, and who else better to write it in the most respectful way than Han Kang? After all, she did Human Acts brilliantly. That was and still is my favourite Han Kang novel/book. It’s either that or this. Han Kang's highly sensitive, meticulous way of composing her work/writing is almost unrivalled (or at least a tough contender).

Not a spoiler per say, but the haunting yet silent, cold ‘image’ of the sawed off fingers of one of the characters — saturated the entire ‘mood’ of the novel for me. To me it didn’t feel like it was just being introduced early/used as something to increase ‘shock value’, but I think there is more to it than that. It was so carefully and cleverly done. I thought it suitable to bring that one up because I thought it one of the highest forms of literary ‘art’ ever crafted. That, juxtaposed with the paragraph about the falling, red camellia petals on snow. Without discounting or disrespecting the beauty of the writing, my personal experience of reading this book, I feel, is almost like walking through an art installation, a living/breathing museum of some kind. This is because it depicts a time in history that I have no connection to, and only know of vaguely. When I think of Jeju, this is definitely not what comes to mind. In fact, (other than it being a go-to 'travel destination', and the legendary women divers) I would actually be reminded of my least distant memory linked to the word and place itself. And that was a very mundane scene of (having just shared a Jeju-grown (allegedly) orange with my mother, and then being vaguely orange-scented entering a shop to quickly buy something) almost bumping into a wavy-haired child in there screaming ‘I hate you’ (in Korean) repeatedly at a man who is probably his dad; and then the dad and I made meaningless, exhausted eye contact before we went opposite directions and went on with our lives. It all just reminds me of the importance of context; and how each one of us are essentially weavers of our collective memory — interconnected, interwoven, everlasting ‘fabric’ of life.

Surely not a book I’ll read only once. For one, the obvious reason — a brilliant piece of literature, but then also because one of my favourite translators (Emily Yae Won, I'll Go On) has already gone and translated this particular Han Kang book into English. The publication date is some time in the next year I believe? Call it a lack of patience if you will, but I had to read this. I started with the original Korean text but Han Kang is especially difficult to read (in my opinion, with my deficient familiarity with the Korean language, because for a lack of a better phrase, her writing is akin to something like poetic prose which is something I would adore and appreciate fully in my ‘dominant’ language that is English (for better or worse, it just is)). I got the one in Chinese translation because I thought the cover was especially gorgeous. But mostly I read it in French, which should have been my first option anyway if I had been sensible about it. But evidently chaos and desperation dominated my reading experience.

The French translation is by no means a subpar one. It’s so brilliantly done that it ended up being the finalist for the Prix Femina Etranger 2023; and the winner for the Prix Médicis Etranger 2023. The core of the novel, the way I read it/think of it, is an advocate to go against ‘forgetting’. To not stand with the erasure of history (but essentially memory both personal and collective). Because to conveniently/comfortably lean on that and to act on that would be an act of violence (the second act of violence to the first act of violence if there is already one to begin with). Can’t remember which writer had said this, but the ones who remember more hurt more (and I’m sure there are many other variations of this said by others). But Han Kang heads on in stronger and illuminates the fact that actually the one who forgets more is the one who hurts others more. The one who is alright with ‘forgetting’ is essentially the one who is more tolerant of violence, therefore being the one who sustains the continuance of violence upon others. Nothing to do with amnesia or Alzheimer’s here, but that should go without saying, but common sense is not so common, or however the cliché goes!

Han Kang always makes the focal point of her writing the complexities and beauty of human relationships no matter what it is she writes about or around. Surely someone else must have made the connection, and I’m not the first one indulging in this revelation, but there is something Sebaldian about Han Kang’s writing. I’m thinking of The Emigrants (which I did like, but forgot to catalogue/review, read some time last year) in particular. The emotional and mental fallout of a traumatic event, essentially. So with that lingering thought in mind, I Google-ed ‘Han Kang Sebald’, and was led to an article by The Guardian, written by Han Kang, about the books of her life — unsurprisingly, she calls Sebald a writer ‘who changed her mind’ (on what I do not know, perhaps simply in a generally transformative way) — and she also considers ‘The Emigrants’ in particular to be the one she ‘cherish(es)’ (most of all?). The entire article, I thought to be a thought-provoking and interesting disclosure of her personal thoughts and ‘journey’ as a reader as well as a writer.

If she’s not the most read one, then Han Kang is surely one of the more often read (South Korean) writers in the Anglosphere (I may have even read somewhere that she’s more popular or at least read more ‘abroad’, or rather ‘in translation’ than she is in South Korea), but just imagine how enticing her books will be to fans of Sebald? I do not mean this in a derogatory way (because I, too, am a fan of Sebald). If anything, I only feel a strange and isolated excitement in relation to that. I hope any reader who adores Sebald will give Han Kang a read if they haven’t already done it. More likely than not that they will appreciate (and even find resonance in) Han Kang’s work the way I did. But I do specifically mean this one in particular, and also ‘Human Acts’ (this, in hindsight, I believe I have under-rated, and should give it another read; I have heard from friends that it is also significantly more ‘profound’ and ‘nuanced’ in its original, Korean text (but ultimately one can argue that this has to do with an individual preference/taste of literary translation style), but alas I am not so incline towards such acts of biblio-masochism — to read an entire untranslated Han Kang novel).

And lastly, what strikes me as interesting is how the title of the book is translated slightly differently in every language it has been and will be translated into (which isn’t anything too extraordinary, but it interests me nonetheless). In English, I believe it has been decided, and will be titled, ‘We Do Not Part’. In Swedish, (to my own understanding) ‘I Do Not Say Goodbye’. In Chinese, (again my own ‘direct’ understanding of it), ‘(To) Forever Not Bid Farewell’. In French, of course, is ‘Impossible Goodbyes’, which I feel is the most beautiful translation out of all (and the English one being my least favourite of all — bit too colloquial to grab a reader’s attention I would think).

The core ‘note(s)’ of the book (at least the way I read/understand it) is to highlight the importance of the preservation of ‘memories’ of violent histories caused by humans upon humans, such as in this case, mass-killings/ a massacre. Some would argue that through this, we would all (as human beings) ‘learn’ and refrain from repetition. But evidently, even as I read the book/write my thoughts about it at this moment in time (in different parts of the world) war, massacres and genocides persist. Surely, it makes one think. And perhaps thinking, or rather the persistence of ‘human thoughts’ are those that keep our humanity intact/alive. And this spills over to the ‘philosophies’ of AI (progression/future) in relation to ‘consciousness’ — about how essentially human ‘imagination’ is the most ‘human’ thing about being a human.

Not clever enough to go any deeper into that, but I’m reading AI 2041: Ten Visions for Our Future by Chen Qiu Fan (who also goes by Stanley Chen) on the side — and all of that is being touched on/explored brilliantly. Without going on a full-blown tangent here, what I am essentially trying to say is that it is all relevant and related. Not a lack of ‘conscience’ (a vague concept that varies slightly/drastically from one person to another) but (more importantly) a lack of ‘consciousness’ is what makes room/a fertile bed for violence (and ultimately poses the largest risk to ‘humanity’ especially when including matters such as climate issues as well). And the abundance of evidence makes it all hard to deny. There is also an underlying whiff of ‘Tao’ (which again I am not clever to go further into but can recommend Ken Liu’s translation of the text, Laozi's Dao De Jing). It is a difficult text (at least for me), but luckily there is no shortage of options when it comes to the text in ‘translation’. I may be wrong (could’ve easily been another writer) but I am quite sure in one interview, Chen has mentioned that one of the translated texts resonates with him more than the original text (although ‘Chinese’ is his ‘dominant’ language) which I thought was really interesting (bringing it back to the first line of this review, Tiang’s view on literary translation — being largely about ‘vibes’ — which is also applicable here). And perhaps if we assume the interchangeability of the word ‘resonate’ with ‘vibes’ here, then it just means that instead of reading in a single, straightforward manner, to ‘vibe’ with a piece of text would be to read with one’s entire being. And that is not unlike my experience of Han Kang’s narrative (her historically-leaning ones at least).

[Enrique · Rating 4 out of 5]

Para todos aquellos escépticos de la autora, o del comienzo de la narración, para aquellos prisillas (entre los cuales muchas veces me incluyo) que pudieran pensar que se trata de uno de esos libros enigmáticos, bien narrados y casi poéticos, aunque sin ningún contenido de fondo, para todos esos dotados de poca paciencia, debo decir que existe una buena historia de fondo que se va conquistando con el paso de las páginas y la calma.
 
Una narración un tanto laberíntica que busca de forma directa ir a los sentidos. No haré espoiler pero debo confesar que de inicio no me convencía mucho: un viaje a un pueblo de interior con el objetivo exclusivo del salvamento de un pájaro…(ese pájaro bien pudiera ser un señuelo) vamos no lo hacía mío; pero el lenguaje era bello. Con el discurrir de las páginas me fui metiendo en la narración, por momentos poética, fantástica, imposible, pero hermosa, y que va cobrando sentido de forma plena. Han Kang nos la va haciendo visible.
 
La búsqueda de los restos de las personas desaparecidas en un régimen totalitario, y consecuentemente y con ese fin hallar el descanso sus familiares (¿os suena?). Esa pudiera ser la aguja en el pajar, el filón y el sentido que andábamos buscando en la narración: todo ello dentro de un entorno un tanto mágico y misterioso, y revestido inicialmente de un envoltorio que hay que ir desenvolviendo poco a poco. No dejar que cuaje la sombra del olvido.
 
El formato de narración es muy visual, rozando en ocasiones la narración cinematográfica. Esos troncos negros en una marea, con la nieve de fondo. ¿Que vienen a significar? ¿Se pueden asemejar los intereses de las dos protagonistas de la novela, como parece apuntar la autora? ¿O bien que una protagonista haga suyos los sueños de la narradora en primera persona? Parece ser que sí, pero evidentemente quedan muchas dudas y sombras sin despejarse en la narración. Se nos abren dudas tras terminarlo.
 
Me recordaba en algún momento al anterior Premio Nobel, Fosse, ambos mezclan realidad factible, con cuestiones que están alejadas de la razón, todo ello sin dar explicaciones, dejando en el aire y al criterio del lector esa bruma de verosimilitud de todo. Buena mezcla.

[Alberto Villarreal · Rating 3 out of 5]

Este es el tercer libro que leo de Han Kang y también el que menos me ha gustado. Me encanta como escribe esta autora, pero me parece que después de tanto que ha escrito, intentó cambiar su estilo... y hay algo que se pierde ahí, todavía no tengo muy claro lo que es.

[switterbug (Betsey) · Rating 5 out of 5]

I took far too long to read Kang’s historical fiction masterpiece, set in South Korea. I started it in September or early October, and fell off the reading cliff into mud. It’s been a rough few months for me, but I was consistently eager to get back each time to Kang’s characters, and to what two friends will do when faced with urgency and disaster.

Han Kang is the latest Nobel Prize writer winner, and you feel the gravitas of this kind of award right at the beginning of the book. And how well-deserved it is. I was riveted from first page to last-- the pile-up of tragedies avoided gratuitous narrative, the attempt to manage memories was front and center, and the successes and failures hard. It’s as if Kang witnessed these events herself, and I felt them viscerally as a reader.

An observer, that’s who Kang and her characters are, even if she and they lived in a different era. Kang animated the buried, breathed oxygen into what was hidden. Her themes about history are to share it. Covering up, erasing dark times is no way to stop it from happening again. She nails it with no platitudes or false sentiment.

I noticed the word “cleave” used a lot in the story, the one word that means two opposing actions. It’s a word I notice when it is present, and Kang had to be purposeful. Check it out each time you read it; it is usually during a high intensity development that it is placed in a sentence.

This author nourishes themes of friendship, of sisterhood love (although the two women aren’t blood related). Crisis stems from injury and subtly tests their relationship. Then it evolves or devolves into an historical nightmare--an epic, tortuous narrative of a time when people died protecting their place in the world. Ordinary heroes, unsung heroes, but also slaughtered victims. The ones who didn’t die were left to tell the story of their ancestor’s tragedies. Oppression, then repression, and, over a half-century later, the buried are revealed.

The two friends, Kyungha and Inseon, tried to find the dead bodies when burial sites are upended during a climate catastrophe. But it’s a rough landscape.

What will people do to their fellow humans? In the name of genocide, a human construct made to extinguish rather than distinguish ourselves. This is the kind of writing that wins me over. I could select any page and find a beautifully written passage.

“What if you and I were to plant logs in a field, dress them in black ink and film them under falling snow?”
All that will make sense as a metaphor to genocide, to harrowing torture in a flux of time. We are in a terrifying era at this moment. When I read about other traumas in history, I try to reach out in some retrospective way. Reading the passionate words of an elegant writer was just the right thing for this moment.

[Akankshya · Rating 5 out of 5]

Here is another one of Han Kang's books that inspires a passionate review and recommendation, but leaves me gripped with mournful introspection.

We Do Not Part is an ode to friendship, sisterhood, motherhood, and the circular remembrances that connect us to both suffering and survival. The book is divided into three parts, detailing (on the surface) the story of a troubled young woman who travels to Jeju Island to save her injured friend's beloved pet bird, and ends up unpacking the gruesome circumstances of the Jeju 4.3 Massacre of 1948. Han Kang is well-versed in recounting tragedies and massacres that are forgotten by history (at least outside Korea) in beautiful, poetic, evocative prose. Her writing goes beyond evocative to hypnotic in this work, with the veil between reality and dreams drawn back in an experimental narrative that could have become nonsensical quickly but ended up poignant as it tied together all the threads of the story. Ultimately, the story pierced through my heart, and I know this is one I would go beyond recommending to others. I know I will reread this someday and try to divine meaning through its superbly translated text again.

4.5/5 stars rounded up. A compelling read, repetitive at times, hard-hitting at times. I might like this better than Human Acts, and both can be read as companion novels. No wonder these novels resulted in a Nobel for the author.

Thanks to Netgalley and Random House Publishing Group for a copy of the ARC in exchange for an honest review! We Do Not Part is being published in the US on Jan 21, 2025.

[PattyMacDotComma · Rating 4 out of 5]

4★
“Stooped and listing, they gave the impression of a thousand men, women and haggard children huddling in the snow.

Was this a graveyard? I wondered. Are these gravestones?”

This is part of Kyungha’s dream, which is based on a dream the author had that inspired this book. The entire opening segment is almost exactly how the author recounted her dream in an NPR interview.

In the story, Kyungha says she dreamed this not long after her book about a massacre was published. She is suffering in sweltering summer heat with broken air conditioning, and when she finally sleeps, she’s dreaming snowy scenes that she thinks might be from her future. She sees the tide encroaching on the ‘gravestones’ and sites of bones that will be washed away.

Awake, she is so hot that she considers ending her life.

“The previous summer, as my private life began to crumble like a sugar cube dropped in water, back when the real partings that were to follow were only a premonition, I’d written a story titled ‘Farewell’, a story about a woman of snow who melts away under sleet. But that can’t be my actual, final farewell.”

She falls asleep on the floor only to dream so strongly of snow and the ‘graves’ that she knows she can’t give up – she has to do something about them.

Summer ends, and Kyungha is surprised by a text message from her close friend, Inseon, saying only her name: ‘Kyungha’. When she texts back, asking if everything is all right, she receives only: ‘Can you come right away?’

Inseon is a filmmaker with a focus on women and war, and the two young women have been planning to do a project together one day, making logs into standing “torsos” representing those who were massacred during WWII.

Inseon is now in a Seoul hospital, requiring urgent, continued care, and she presses Kyungha to please please please go to the little village on the island of Jeju where Inseon lives to save her last adored bird and stay in the house until Inseon is released.

The book opens with unbearable heat and moves to an almost unbelievable cold, all with an eerie, moody, haunting quality. There are dreamlike sequences that seem real to Kyungha.

In her NPR interview, Han Kang explains why there was such focus on snow.

“Snow; It falls between the sky and the earth and connecting the both. And it falls between the living and the dead, between light and darkness, between silence and memories. And I thought of the connection, the circular flow of water and air. We are all connected over this earth so I had this image of the snow. I wanted the snow to fall from beginning to end and I wanted even my characters to enter into that dream of snow.”

There is a lot of history – of which I admit I am ignorant. There are stories of horrifying massacres, people hiding in caves in the hills, the sorts of awful stories I’m more familiar with from Europe during WWII.

Her writing is absolutely compelling. I haven’t read any of her other work, but I have some idea of why the Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to her.

The facts, the history, the descriptions, the dreamlike quality and moodiness are beautifully drawn, well worth five stars. But – and for me it is a big ‘but’ - sadly, I was never invested in the characters and their story.

Thanks to #NetGalley and Penguin UK for a copy of #WeDoNotPart for review.

The NPR interview the author: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TrYj1...

p.s. Goodreads friend Barb has posted a terrific review with illustrations which really help describe the mood and feeling of the story.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

[Matthew Ted]

105th book of 2024.

One of those books that feels impossible to give an arbitrary rating to. On the one hand, Kang has written an incredibly deft novel about the Jeju Massacre in 1948, on the other, she has written an abstract novel that reads like sand falling through your fingers. Considering the novel's 400 page weight, there's not much to be said about where the pages go: a large swathe of the novel details the narrator waiting at a bus stop in a snowstorm, then walking through the snow, in the attempt to save her friend's budgie. The final hundred pages or so details the dreamlike investigation into her friend's family history and the Jeju Uprising. It is a book full of quiet but poignant images: a budgie hushing as soon as a cover is thrown over its cage, endless snowfall, shadows moving on walls, logs of wood painted black, a bus crawling through the snowstorm, missing fingers... These images all drift, like a snowstorm itself, and carry us through the incredibly weightless narrative. Like the movie in the novel that is planned but never made, the novel reads like an assortment of slides or images, hauntingly quiet, that flicker before your eyes. I can't say I 'liked' the book; I was unnerved by it, sometimes confused by it, but ultimately impressed by Kang's ability to write a novel about this diabolical historical event in a seemingly directionless and airy narrative. What persists in my mind most of all are the black logs standing in the snow, the shadows on the walls and the silencing of a bird.

Thank you to Penguin for the advance copy for review. We Do Not Part is published in English in the UK in February 2025.

[Ken]

This is my first Han Kang book, and I will mostly remember it for the symbolic snow from start to finish. One of nature's most common features, yet here used so many artful ways. That aspect alone tells you it's a work of literary fiction to be reckoned with. Not easy. Demanding your attention. It jumps between characters, location, time. It brings to life a previously unknown page of history (to me), the massacre of people on the island of Jeju at the hands of the US-backed South Korean government. This in 1948.

In addition to the compellingly gruesome descriptions from history, we get the gentle pages depicting a special friendship between two women collaborating on a project called "We Do Not Part." One of them, Inseon, owns birds, who fly up to meet snowflakes pouring down for a special symbolic place in this book. Han Kang is not afraid of walking a line between dream or delusion and reality, either. At times, we lose the compass of reality and wonder when and why it has been placed back in our hands.

Probably a book worth revisiting some year in that it's sure to give more on subsequent readings. Strange that January is almost gone and this is my first completed book, apparently, but maybe fitting. Some dinners are best appreciated deliberately. One doesn't read this book quickly for entertainment, in other words.

[Hannah · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow. There is so much to dissect in this book. I'm so grateful it was translated since my abilities in Korean language probably peaked out at a fourth-grade level.

There are multiple government-sanctioned atrocities underpinning the book, both in times of war and "peace," like the abuse of Vietnamese women by Korean soldiers, the kidnapping and repeated and violent rape of Korean women by Japanese soldiers, and the government massacres in Gwangju, Jeju, and Bodo. All of these marks in history involved the forced separation of family and the trauma passed down from generation to generation, along with all the physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual ailments that accompanied them. The majority of the book focuses on the Jeju uprising and its subsequent squashing, but in all three cases of government massacre, it was only with the aid, approval, and participation of the US government that they were done. This is a big reason why I tell people that the Korean government is a mere puppet of the US government and that we've long since been politically annexed. (Yes, I'm resentful, even as a US citizen.) The focus of the book on all these atrocities is to emphasize the need for national processing trauma and its reconciliation in order to heal and come to terms with its violent past.

This very important and necessary step is also why I believe the US is in the state that it's in - it's never been held accountable for the genocides, kidnappings, enslavements, and displacements of its own Indigenous and Black peoples. The fact that Jeju is the setting is important in this sense because it has also been the site of historical violence and subjugation of both its indigenous people and its land by Koreans and Japanese, as well as the repression of Jeju language and culture, which is still ongoing by the government and broader culture (e.g., the Indigenous Jeju language is often referred to as unintelligible Korean). By setting the story in Jeju, it's like Kang is trying to bring some truth and reconciliation to its people as well.

There is a known history of the Korean government actively trying to redact its role in these inhumanities, and that's why the documentary filmmaking is so important in the book as well. However, because of the government censorship and the national pain of reliving the trauma, many voices having been forcibly and/or willing silenced, the joint documentary Kyungha and Inseon have been trying to make for years has also been stilted. But through their friendship, the telling and the listening of their personal stories and how they intersect with national history helps bring the truth out into the world in an attempt to undo some of the damage done by years of obfuscation and suppression. It further demonstrates that yes, truth hurts (literally), but that's why the truth will set you free.

Unfortunately, I again see a parallel to the same efforts in the US to suppress the truth of its national acts of shame. MAGA, the Daughters of the Confederacy, and other white supremacist groups have systematically been trying to keep the truth hidden by either erasing history or revisioning history to tell a softer tale (did you know the chapters on slavery in most US classroom history books have been written largely by the Daughters of the Confederacy and that they are the ones perpetuating the lies of the Lost Cause, the "peculiar institution," and the states' rights as the primary reason for the Civil War?). This has been going on since colonial days, and it's now being done more actively and more brazenly than it has in a while as Florida removes Rosa Parks from the history books and banning African American studies from its advanced placement high school history classes, as the records of service and contribution of Black and LGBTQ+ veterans (including military luminary Colin Powell) are deleted, as DE&I programs nationwide are being dismantled, as public schools start teaching from the Bible, etc. The point of Kang's book, though, is that national history/historical memories can never really be snuffed out because the truth shall always prevail. There will always be oral history, family records, and other documentation that will always rise to the surface. As long as there are people who are trying to be silenced, these same people will find a way to manifest their voices in another way.

On the topic of truth, I thought it was really clever of Kang to use duality (which is the closest word I can think of) to question what is truth and what is questioned truth. By this, I'm talking about both Inseon and the bird. Are they really with Kyungha in Inseon's apartment, or are they actually elsewhere? Are they as sick/dead as is implied physically, or is it only corporeal in that intergenerational trauma harms the body? All throughout, the themes of Kyungha's dreams indicate a struggle for her voice to be used (as a stand-in for the national voice that must be rediscovered), and her blurred reality is a demonstration of the fluid nature of truth - how is truth determined and whose truth is the right truth, and whose voice is the one to set the truth?

I have so much more to say about this book, but I think this is enough for now. Of the four books I've read by Kang, this one is the most powerful and the one that makes clear to me why she won the Nobel Prize.

[Paula Mota · Rating 3 out of 5]

2,5*

Apercebi-me de que a vida era uma coisa extremamente vulnerável. A carne, os órgãos, os ossos, os fôlegos que passavam diante dos meus olhos, tinham todos dentro de si o potencial de se quebrar, de cessar – tão facilmente, e bastando uma única decisão.

“Despedidas Impossíveis” poderia ser o resultado da junção do impressionante “Atos Humanos” e do decepcionante “O Livro Branco”, no entanto, não é tão visceral com o primeiro nem tão etéreo como o segundo e daí a classificação sofrível. Han Kang venceu o Nobel da Literatura de 2024 e, como tal, é a última escritora a precisar do meu elogio e ainda bem, porque não tenho nenhum a fazer-lhe excepto o de me ter tornado uma pessoa mais informada, mas isso qualquer livro de não-ficção o poderia ter competentemente feito sem o embrulhar numa catadupa de comparações. Não é preciso ser-se muito atento para reparar que o único recurso estilístico, o único adorno literário, o único efeito poético que sai da mão da autora sul-coreana é a boa da símile. Isso é sinal de uma grande mestria? Para mim, de modo algum.

Borbotos brancos salpicavam as mangas como se fossem gotas de água. No bolso direito, havia cascas de tangerina que não tinham ainda secado completamente. (…) A luz entrava pela janela, e a neve caía lá fora. Em grandes flocos, como pássaros descendo pelo ar em silêncio.

É verdade que sou uma leitora muito temperamental, que aquilo que é insignificante para a maioria pode ser uma pedra no meu sapato, e este abuso de analogias sem dúvida que me condicionou a experiência, mas não foi a única circunstância. Há outras de que a autora não tem culpa, que se prendem só comigo, mas são os alicerces de “Despedidas Impossíveis”: os sonhos, os fantasmas, a neve. O que é sonho neste livro? Quem está vivo? Qual é o significado simbólico da omnipresente neve? Cada leitor terá a sua interpretação e talvez dependa dela o sucesso deste romance.

Não sei se é isto que acontece antes de morrermos. Tudo o que alguma vez vivi torna-se cristalino. Nada dói já. Centenas, milhares de momentos cintilam em uníssono, como flocos de neve cujas formas elaboradas são inteiramente visíveis. Como isto é possível, não sei. Todas as minhas dores e alegrias, os desgostos e os amores mais profundos, brilham, não como uma amálgama mas num todo constituído por singularidades distintas, cintilando juntas como uma nebulosa gigante.

Kyungha, uma escritora que, à semelhança de Han Kang, publicou um livro sobre o massacre de Gwangju, nunca se conseguiu libertar dos horrores dessa sublevação e encontra-se num extremo estado de fragilidade psicológica que também se manifesta em enxaquecas incapacitantes e pesadelos recorrentes. Quando a sua amiga Inseon, internada devido a um acidente de trabalho, lhe pede que vá a sua casa, na ilha de Jeju, para alimentar o seu adorado periquito, Kyungha tem de percorrer a pé uma zona rural que mal conhece, sob um forte nevão ao anoitecer, a fim de lá chegar a tempo de salvar a ave. É aí que toma conhecimento do trauma geracional de que sofre a família da sua amiga, filha de sobreviventes do massacre de Jeju, que ocorreu entre 1948 e 1954, tendo dizimado cerca de 10% da população da ilha.

Coloquei a mão sobre a fotografia dos ossos. Sobre pessoas que já não tinham olhos nem línguas. Sobre pessoas cujos órgãos e músculos tinham apodrecido. Sobre o que já não era humano – não. Sobre o que mesmo agora permanecia humano.

É curioso que a Coreia do Sul, polida e refulgente como a conhecemos hoje, tenha, como a maioria das nações, um passado tão sangrento e fratricida, e nem me refiro à guerra civil e à divisão do país em dois, mas a tudo o que se passou dentro das suas fronteiras actuais, uma vez mais, vizinhos contra vizinhos. Para perceber o que aconteceu em Jeju é preciso recuar à invasão japonesa (1910-1945) e não esquecer a conivência dos EUA na supressão de tudo o que fossem movimentos de inspiração comunista, mas o que choca de facto não é a ingerência, porque se tornou comum, são os números: 300 aldeias e dezenas de milhares de casas destruídas, 30 mil mortos atirados ao mar, para grutas, para valas comuns.

Viro página após página de fotografias que mostram restos de esqueletos que foram separados e distribuídos por enormes cestos de plástico: milhares de tíbias. Milhares de crânios. Dezenas de milhares de costelas.

[Vanessa (semi-hiatus) · Rating 5 out of 5]

In We Do Not Part, friends Inseon and Kyungha have previously agreed to collaborate on a project but they’ve not seen one other in the past year nor worked on their project.

Kyungha lives in Seoul and Inseon on the island of Jeju.

Inseon becomes hospitalized in Seoul and asks her friend to travel to the island to look after her pet bird, Ama. She had enough food and water to last two days and it’s the second day when Kyungha makes the trip.

There is a terrific snowstorm and during the trek things in the book become fuzzy between reality, the spiritual world, the past, and the present.

Han Kang’s novel deals with generational trauma from the 4.3 massacre on Jeju in 1948 as well as the 1980 Gwangju Uprising. The past is a character itself in a way. It plays a huge part in the present.

Pain—physical and from memories—is also a significant factor to the story.

This is not an easy work to describe, and I know I’ve not read a novel like this before. Han Kang forces the reader to slow down; to disengage from one's own reality and to step into the ethereal realm.

Reading We Do Not Part was an evocative and memorable experience. I’m so grateful that my friend Kim invited me to a buddy read for this book. You can read her thoughtful review here

[Renklikalem · Rating 5 out of 5]

Devletlerin utançlarının faturasını dünyanın neresinde olursa olsun hep bireyler ödüyor. Üstelik kuşaklar boyu aktarılan bir travmayla. “Şu karanlığı delip geçmek mümkün müdür ki?” Hala her gün tüm dünyanın gözü önünde yapılan işkencelere, kıyımlara şahit olurken ve günün sonunda kaybedenin sadece sivil halk olduğunu bile bile yaşamaya nasıl devam eder insan? Han Kang’ın çabasını bu anlamda çok kıymetli buluyorum. Her kitabı bir tokat, her kitabı ayrı bir saygı duruşu. Ne yazsa kalbimden vuruyor zaten istisnasız.

Şimdilerde bir tatil adası olarak bilinen Jeju Adası’na gidiyoruz bu sefer. Adanın çok değil yetmiş yıl önce büyük bir toplu katliama ev sahipliği yapmış olması ne tuhaf. Tuhaf kelimesi tabii sakil kalıyor yaşananları ve rakamları düşününce. Böyle yazarken yalnızca bir rakamdan ibaret olan kişilerin çoluk çocuk, kadın erkek yaklaşık otuz bin kişi olması da öyle sakil işte. Adanın nüfusunun yüzde onundan bahsediyoruz. Düşünebiliyor musunuz? Suçları komünist olmak. Sanki hiçbir şey olmamış gibi insanları gruplar halinde öldürüp denizde gel gite bırakmışlar, maden oyuklarına itmişler.

“İnsan insana ne yaparsa yapsın artık daha fazla şaşırmayacakmışım gibi gelen bir durum… Kalbimin derinliklerinden bir şeylerin çoktan sökülüp atıldığı, açılan boşluğu ıslatarak çıkan kanın artık kırmızı olmadığı, daha fazla şiddetle fışkırmadığı ve paramparça kesikte ancak teslimiyetin durdurabileceği bir acının titreştiği bir durum….”

Bu ayıp sonsuza kadar sürebilirmiş gibi diriyken rahat vermedikleri insanların ölülerine de rahat vermemişler. Ada halkının ölülerini anmak için diktiği anıtı 60’larda yıkmışlar, 78’de katliamı anlatan bir romanı yasaklayıp yazarını da hapse atmışlar. Şüphesiz hakkında yazması birçok yönüyle zor bir konu. Fakat bunu bu kadından başka böyle dokunaklı, kimseyi incitmeden tokatlayarak kim anlatabilirdi bilmiyorum. Hem kişisel hem kolektif hafızamıza bir çivi gibi çakıyor tüm satırları. Günlerdir kafamın içinde sayıklamalar halinde dönüp dolanıyor yazdıkları. Bu kadar acı, bunca ahla nasıl dönüyor bu dünya. Tam da benim sık sık kendi kendime kurduğum şu cümleyi kuruyor kitabın bir yerinde: “İnanılmaz olan, güneşin her gün yeniden doğmasıydı.”

En etkilendiğim yanlarından biri de hep olduğu gibi karakterin aklı karıştıka benim de kafamın bulanması, yazarın bir şekilde tüm o acıları okura da hissettiriyor olması. Kitabın ilginç yanlarından biri de tekrar okunmak için adeta okuru çağırması. Bitireli birkaç gün olmasına rağmen elime aldığım her farklı kitapta tekrar beni çağırıyor sanki. Orman aklıma düşüyor, ağaçlar, karakterler, acılar. Kitaptaki ormanın Gyongha’yı çağırması gibi… Han Kang ne yazarsa yazsın insanın karmaşıklıklarını, travmalarını ve yaralarını çok sağlam anlatıyor. Dilerim yaşayanlarının da ölenlerinin de ruhu huzur bulur bu toprakların.

Temmuzun bu çılgın sıcağında sizi sanki karlar altında kalmış gibi üşütecek, zihninizin bir an bile susmasına izin vermeden okuyacağınız bu romanı kaçırmamanızı öneririm.

[Ernst · Rating 4 out of 5]

Der Reihe nach: die erste Hälfte ist wundervoll poetisch, ein echter Lesegenuss. Viel Schnee, eine Reise ins Ungewisse, die Geschichte einer innigen Freundschaft aber auch einer großen Einsamkeit. Es kommt hier eine überzeugende Szene nach der anderen, im Krankenhaus, im Bus, an der Bushaltestelle, auf dem verschneiten Weg zu Inseons Haus, usw.

Die zweite Hälfte hat mich leider nicht überzeugt. Ich habe beim Lesen immer stärker gemerkt wie mir das Ding entgleitet. Und das macht es so schwierig eine Wertung abzugeben, denn es geht um grausame, historische Ereignisse im zweiten Teil, um Bürgerkrieg, unfassbare Massaker, Flucht und Folterung, um die quälende Ungewissheit Angehöriger, ob ihre Lieben irgendwo in einem Straflager vielleicht doch überlebt haben. Wie soll man das bewerten? Literarisch fand ich es einfach nicht gut gelöst. Man erfährt von den Grausamkeiten vor allem in Form von Briefen und Erzählungen von Inseon und ihrer Mutter. Das wird dann jeweils in Kursivschrift gezeigt. Ich muss zugeben, ich hab mich zunehmend vor den kursiven Abschnitten gefürchtet, weil sie mich immer wieder aus dem Text rausgeschleudert haben. Sie werden dem Thema nicht gerecht. Vielleicht gibt es für solche Dinge einfach keine passende Sprache, Han Kang versucht es, für ihre Intention vergessene, verschwiegene Gräuel zu benennen bewundere ich sie, aber wie schon in ihrem Buch Menschenwerk, findet sie dafür meiner Meinung nach einfach nicht die richtigen Mittel. Diese Passagen bei denen ich als Leser eigentlich höchste Empathie empfinden sollte, bleiben merkwürdig distanziert.
Der Haupthandlungsfaden gerät dadurch zunehmend zum künstlich aufgestellten Szenario um das historische Thema zu transportieren, die Figuren werden dadurch unauthentischer und in Summe ist der Roman nicht rund für mich, obwohl die Autorin auf den letzten 20 Seiten genau das versucht, nämlich alles abzurunden und poetisch ausklingen zu lassen.
Die erste Hälfte hätte ich mit 5🌟 bewertet und die zweite schwankt zwischen 3 und 4🌟.
Ich gebe daher erstmal 4🌟 und lasse es ein paar Tage wirken, ob es sich stimmig anfühlt.