“I had not reconciled with life, but I had to resume living.”
We Do Not Part will probably be a lot of folks’ introduction to Han Kang, being that it is her first new release in translation since she won the Nobel Prize for Literature last year. And I think that this haunting novel is a perfectly fitting place to start.
We Do Not Part encapsulates all of the things I have come to expect from Han’s writing — gorgeously poetic prose (this time translated from Korean by Emily Yah Won and Paige Aniyah Morris rather than her usual translator Deborah Smith), eeriness bordering on (and sometimes tipping over) the edge of horror, and unflinching references to the darkest parts of Korean history (in this case the 1948-49 Jeju massacre).
I didn’t realize until reading the lecture that Han Kang gave as part of the Nobel prize ceremony how often she incorporates elements of her own life in her work. I know very little about her personal life, and apparently few others do either — her husband, a literary critic, was referenced in a number of biographical articles of the author around the time of her Nobel win, but she then revealed that they have actually been divorced for many years.
Of course you don’t need to know much about an author to enjoy their work, and in particular it’s not necessarily any of our business how much of themselves an author does or does not put into their stories (and I’ve written before how frustrating it is that people often assume women’s novels are autobiographical in a way that they never do for men).
However, in this case it does seem that there are key elements of some of Han’s stories that were inspired by real moments in her life. In her Nobel lecture, she says that, like the unnamed narrator of the stunning The White Book, she too had an older sister who lived for only a few hours after birth. As in Human Acts, she happened on a book with photos of the Gwangju massacre that inspired her writing the novel.
And the dream in We Do Not Part, the dream of black tree stumps that served as markers for a mass grave by the sea, that dream was shared by the author and her protagonist (and the protagonist, like the author, is a novelist who wrote a 2014 novel about Gwangju in an effort to shake its hold on her, only to find herself further haunted).
While of course many authors have similar moments of inspiration that they draw from their own lives and insert, overtly or covertly, into their writing, in Han’s case these elements serve to further blend reality and unreality in a way that she does masterfully across her work.
In We Do Not Part, the protagonist Kyungha is called on by her friend and artistic partner Inseon to travel to Jeju and look after her pet bird while she is in hospital. What begins as a straightforward journey turns surreal when Kyungha finds herself in the midst of a snowstorm as she attempts to reach Inseon’s home.
And in the second half of the novel, as dreams permeate the waking hours, as ghosts visit the living, as past and present meld, the story gains further depth both in plot and in emotion. While the specific atrocity of the Jeju massacre is the main focus, broader themes of mourning and memory fill the pages.
In her Nobel lecture, Han Kang says:
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?
I feel that these questions are present not only in We Do Not Part but across all of Han Kang’s work, and that there is no more adept writer to ask and attempt to answer them. Her Nobel is extremely well deserved, and if this is the book by which new audiences are introduced to her work, then I think it is a poetic, poignant choice.
thebestpossibletime 