We Do Not Part (2021, trans. 2025)
Why this one?
Obviously there’s a lot of hype around this one following Han’s recent major prize win…
Han Kang (1970- ; active 1993- ) was born in Gwangju, South Korea. She comes from a literary family; her father (Han Seung-won) and two of her brothers are also writers. Her family moved from Gwanju to Seoul just four months before the 1980 Gwangju Uprising and subsequent massacre. She found solace in books and later graduated from Yonsei University with a degree in Korean Language and Literature. In 1998, she participated in the University of Iowa International Writing Program.
She worked as a reporter in the early 1990s while beginning to publish poetry and short stories. Her first story collection, A Love of Yeosu, was published in 1995 and saw her quit her job to focus solely on literature. Her fifth book, 2007's The Vegetarian, brought her to wider international attention, particularly following its 2015 English translation by Deborah Smith, which won the 2016 International Booker Prize (the first Korean novel to do so).
We Do Not Part was published in its original Korean in 2021. Its French translation won the Prix Médicis étranger in 2023, and in 2024 she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. This English edition is newly released for 2025, translated by Emily YaeWon and Paige Aniyah Morris, and published by Hogarth. Thanks to them and Netgalley for the ARC.
Thoughts, etc.
We Do Not Part is told from the perspective of a woman named Kyungha, an investigative journalist and writer based in Seoul. She lives alone and suffers from recurring nightmares that seem to symbolically intertwine natural elements and mass human suffering. She receives a message from her long-time friend and collaborator, a photographer, artist and filmmaker called Inseon. Inseon has been hospitalised following a woodworking accident, in which the tips of her fingers were sliced off (notably while working on a project suggested by Kyungha and inspired by her dreams, which she had asked her to stop).
In an attempt to recover the use of her digits, Inseon is subject to a torturous-sounding recovery programme involving regular injections into her hand that must be adminstered 24/7. When Kyungha visits, she is surprised to be asked to travel immediately to the remote Jeju Island where Inseon was based, in order to feed her pet bird. She nonetheless complies with the request, and arrives to find the island in the midst of an intense snowstorm, with transport impacted and only her memory of a previous visit to guide her to Inseon's home. The first half of the book focuses heavily on her seemingly doom-laden journey to try to rescue the bird, in which the elements seem to be conspiring against her. By the book's midpoint, it seems all is lost: while Kyungha makes it to the house, there is no heating and the cold seems unsurvivable. The bird, it seems, has not survived.
While the first section of the book has elements that are both specifically based in dreams and more generally 'dream-like', the book takes a more dramatic shift into this space in its second half. Kyungha awakes in the house to find the bird once more alive, and more confoundingly still, Inseon with her in the house, seemingly uninjured. With minimal questioning, Kyungha accepts this situation and is taken by Inseon on a guided history of her family and its history around and in the shadow of the 1948 Jeju massacre, in which government forces violently suppressed what they said was a left-wing insurgency based on the island.
According to estimates, around a fifth of the island's population, including civilian innocents, women and infants, were massacred on Jeju, with a rolling campaign of detentions and further executions over subsequent years. Like many related incidents in that era of Korean history, discussion was suppressed and facts only began to be made public decades later. In the book, Inseon's parents both survived the massacres by chance, and her mother in particular lived with that weight for the rest of their lives. We learn that her mother, recently passed away, was a key figure in campaigns to reveal the truth of the island's history, and that Inseon has taken on some of that work, both in the form of painstaking research and in translating some of the horrors into her art.
It's a really interesting and unusual framing device that Han deploys here. The book's second part takes us into the real substance of the book's purpose; a rich and detailed depiction of the horrific history of the island (and county), which is rooted very deliberately in real, specific events. And yet we are ostensibly learning about this reality through a strangely unreal scenario. If we're interested in figuring out what is 'happening' to Kyungha in this section, we may speculate that she is on some kind of boundary of consciousness, working through an understanding of what motivated her friend and in the process piecing together ever-deeper and darker elements of her family's history; or that she's consciously awake and engaged in the same process more physically, trawling through Inseon's boxes of documents while (as a result?) having some kind of breakdown in which she invokes her friend's spirit as a kind of consolatory guide.
Han leaves all of this deliberately open, and ultimately it doesn't really matter. The blizzard in which Kyungha is caught both blankets out the present-day reality and brings with it a connection to a past that has been erased and is now resurfacing. It's a really storytelling sleight of hand that foregrounds questions of how atrocities can be covered up, made 'unreal' and memories altered and 'erased' (Inseon's mother's dementia is another metaphorical nod to this) and the struggles (political, journalistic, artistic) through which subsequent generations try to work to recover some of that lost truth.
It's clearly a masterful book and its combination of immensely heavy subject matter and beautifully constructed prose, in which the lightness and fragility of nature (snowflakes, bird's wings) act as counterbalances to that historical weight, make it very evident why Han is now a Nobel Laureate. At times, I found the dream-like nature a little too wispy and hard to hold onto, and early on questioned whether I'd get on with it as a result (I am one of those people who really does not enjoy hearing about others' dreams). However, the way the whole of the book comes together to render that insubstantiality somehow deeply meaningful was impressive and powerful.
Score
9
A heavy read in terms of subject matter, but its beautifully constructed prose drew me in and its unflinching history educated me. I’m sure we’ll be hearing even more about this one over the course of 2025.
Next up
TBC
