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| Stark truths… Mt Halla, Jeju Island, Korea. |
Review
We Do Not Part by Han Kang review – a masterpiece from the Nobel laureate
One woman’s quest, told through haunting, harrowing, dreamlike imagery, bears witness to Korea’s traumatic
Anne Enrigh
Thursday 6 February 2025
There are books in a writer’s life that gather all their previous themes and explorations in a great act of creative culmination, which both surpasses what had gone before and makes it more clear. We Do Not Part is one of those books. Published last year in Swedish translation, it helped to secure Korean writer Han Kang the 2024 Nobel prize in literature.
Those who know Han’s work will recognise previous themes and methods here. Like the eponymous character in The Vegetarian, the narrator of We Do Not Part, Kyungha, is fragile and resilient. She finds it hard to sleep or eat, suffers from summer heat and winter cold, and endures terrible physical suffering for reasons that can be hard to understand. Both stories feature video artists, sisterly bonds, and nightmares of murder and bloodshed set in Korean woodlands.
There are structural similarities, too. The Vegetarian (whose three distinct sections were originally published separately) moves from one to another point of view around the central, finally starving, figure of Yeong-hye. In We Do Not Part, each section gives way to something that feels stylistically very different, though there is only one narrator and the action takes place over the course of a few days. Each new movement is a shift in consciousness as the novel moves, not around some central mystery (why will Yeong-hye not eat?), but relentlessly towards a terrible historical truth. In order to open her character to the facts, Han needs to break her first, pushing her through suffering and difficulty into a new psychic space.
After a small, searing accident, Kyungha’s friend Inseon asks her to travel to her home on Jeju Island to save her pet bird Ama from starvation. Kyungha, who lives a lonely life, immediately undertakes this tiny, sacred mission. She travels through a snowstorm, as the power grid fails and the transport system shuts down, her mind always on the flickering edge of a migraine. So extreme is the journey that, as she arrives at Inseon’s house, she seems to cross into a different reality, a world of shadows and of ghosts so real that Kyungha does not know if she herself is alive or suffering “the illusions of a dead soul”.
The facts that are so unsparingly uncovered in this shamanistic space concern the aftermath of the 1948 uprising on Jeju Island when 30,000 civilians were killed by anti-communist troops during the search for what Han describes as “one hundred guerrillas in the hills”. This was followed, she writes, by the murder of “two hundred thousand people” on the mainland the next summer, in a series of “exterminations” in the lead-up to the Korean war. The bodies of the slain were washed out to sea, hidden in a cobalt mine, or they remain curled in pits under the modern runway of the island airport. Those who sought the bones of their dead were severely punished. In its insistence on speaking of these things, We Do Not Part resembles Human Acts, Han’s third book to appear in English translation, which told of the May 1980 massacre in Gwangju, when student protests were suppressed during a period of martial law. In both books, atrocity yields, on the page, to images of the human soul as bird and shadow.
Few writers are so unremitting on the subject of pain, which is, for Han, the truth of our mortality. Her impulse is compassionate, but it is bound to a concern with beauty and coldness. Like The White Book, which opens with the tragic death of a newborn, We Do Not Part enters a whiteout and it layers many images of blankness, as if to rehearse the chill and nonexistence of death itself.
If this sounds daunting, it reads wonderfully well. The first two movements of the book are a masterclass of poetic control. We are given some facts about Kyungha’s friend, Inseon; their work together, the accident in her workshop, the trip to the hospital. Only as you read deeper into the book do you realise how carefully placed these details were, how each will become freighted with meaning, until their thematic promise is almost unbearably fulfilled. Nothing is wasted or left undone. Each image settles lightly, but the cumulative weight makes it hard to breathe.
“I walk, feeling a strange compulsion to match my steps to the pace of the drifting snow, which itself seems synchronised to the passage of time.” The passages about snow work by repetition, variation and slow accumulation: dangerous tricks that in other hands might lapse into the meaningless or the banal. Here they are relentlessly beautiful, increasingly terrible, and always simple. It is a relief to know that the slow fall of this section will not last for ever. “If the distance between the clouds and the ground were infinite,” she writes, “the snowflakes too would grow to infinity, but in reality the descent never takes longer than an hour.”
Kyungha describes how spaces within the snow crystal absorb and trap sound, how by reflecting light in myriad directions “it appears colourless, it appears white”. Han’s palette is perfectly controlled. We see white snow, white waves, white thread, a ground crosshatched by the ink strokes of handwriting and by trees stained with “gradations of black”. Clothing is “the colour of rice”, 15 years without sunlight leaves a man “pale as a mushroom”, night is “a sea of ink”, light is blue-grey, pewter and ashen. This field of muted colour is slashed by a shocking series of reds: the blood of Inseon’s relatives frozen on the ground, the glowing slits in a wood stove, red silk wrapped around boxes of files, the earth of a ransacked village stained with burst pots of gochujang sauce. When Kyungha finally asks what the soldiers needed “to exterminate”, the answer comes as political colour: “The reds.”
We Do Not Part is both act of witness and a beautiful poetic object. There are repeated images of birds, candle flame, trees. Even as family relationships become tangled or undone, the novel is bound together by a secret web of lines, of nerves “like silk” and cotton threads, and this lacework expresses the theme of connection in the title. At one point in her journey, Kyungha encounters a blank-eyed older woman, and their separation leaves an emotional mark: “She is neither kin nor acquaintance. She’s only a stranger I happened to stand beside at a bus stop. Why then do I feel in turmoil, as if I have just bid someone farewell?”
The weight of a life can be contained in a single light gesture. Though people leave, their presences remain, and these ghosts are everywhere. Trees have fronds “like sleeves”. The massacred crowd becomes a forest of blackened trunks that are also seen as “pillars of ash”. They have “bodies spun from wind”, that pierce Inseon like thousands of needles, producing a “profound, uncanny euphoria”: grief working close to transcendence as pleasure is to pain.
In the newspaper clippings and research files she finds in the Jeju house, Kyungha senses “something oozing from the page”. Blood runs “beneath the numbers” of the dead. A presence “like the faintest of voices” emanates from the text. This last made the hair stand up on the back of my neck: I thought for a moment that the book in my hand was haunted. It is a rare privilege to read a masterpiece so recently crafted, to know that the new prose you are reading (too fast!) will endure. We Do Not Part is an astonishing book.
We Do Not Part by Han Kang, translated by e yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris, is published by Hamish Hamilton (£18.99)
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