Book Review: We Do Not Part by Han Kang
Han Kang is a South Korean author who was awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature. This novel is my first exposure to her work, and I should clarify from the outset that We Do Not Part is well-written, atmospheric, poetic, and fantastic, but it is not an entertaining book. The effect, at least in me, is similar to how I feel while reading Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn writing about the horrors of the Soviet Gulag. I know that it is important and that people should be aware that these things happened, but at the same time it leaves me disheartened, uneasy, pessimistic, and somewhat depressed.
The story is told in first person by an author, Kyungha, who resembles Kang. She suffers from nightmares after completing a novel about human atrocities, as Kang did after writing her previous novel, Human Acts, which she has referred to as a pair with We Do Not Part. She receives a summons to a hospital from her friend Inseon, who has suffered a serious injury while working on backdrop materials for a film based on the author’s nightmares. Inseon pleads with Kyungha to go to her home on Jeju Island and give food and water to her budgie, a white bird, before it dies. Kyungha sets out in the midst of a snowstorm and after an arduous journey makes it to the isolated house. The budgie has died, and Kyungha buries it.
The power goes out, and as Kyungha waits out the storm alone in the lonely cottage, surrealistic events transpire. The dead budgie returns to life and flies around the sitting room. More significantly, her friend Inseon, who remains bedridden in the hospital far away, appears to Kyungha and tells the story of the massacres that took place on the island in 1948 and 1949, specifically as they related to members of her family. To corroborate her story, Inseon pulls out books, documents, and newspaper clippings that her mother compiled in the years after the massacre. By candlelight, as snow continues to fall outside, Kyungha is drawn deeper and deeper into the account of the terrible atrocities that befell Inseon’s relatives and many other islanders.
In truth, during the Jeju massacres it is estimated between fourteen thousand and thirty thousand people were killed, especially by government troops. Other accounts place the death toll much higher. Kang tells the tale in ominous, poetic prose that immerses readers in the snowstorm, the darkness, and the much deeper darkness of the senseless slaughter of whole families, of old people, young people, and mothers with their children and infants.
Kang’s resemblance to the narrator reminds me of the work of another recent Nobel Prize winner, Annie Ernaux, whose novel The Years I read not long ago. Ernaux also writes autobiographically of her experiences, making the novel read like a memoir. It is a literary device that if well done can be greatly effective, as it is here in We Do Not Part. We are drawn into the narrator’s sense of urgency as she travels to the remote location to save the bird, and when the spirits begin to manifest, we are deeply immersed in the protagonist’s perspective.
This is a sincere, heartfelt, well-written book, but it is not light reading. It is, however, important reading. Just be sure you are in a quiet, secure place so you can give it the full attention it deserves.
