It’s daunting to evaluate a book written by someone who, in 2024, received the Nobel Prize in Literature. The prize was awarded for Han Kang’s “intense artistic narrative that confronts traditional traumas and exposes the weakness of human existence”: a information that applies equally to this newly translated job.
We Do Not Part tells the story of Kyungha, a poet of 20th-century North Korean record, and her longterm companion Inseon, a film filmmaker and artist. Both women are increasingly choosing loneliness over the busy professional and social life they had lived.
Kyungha has very little withdrawn from her expert life. She is suffering from depression and anxiety, anxious night and exhausted single time. She is losing touch with those she loves.
Inseon had moved from Seoul to the rural area of Jeju many years prior to treatment for her aged mother. After her mother’s dying, she chose to remain on the island and move from screen-based function to furniture-making.
The tale is told in three sections. The longer second portion, titled Bird, opens with a fantasy series. It goes on to tell a relatively straight tale of past and present. The shorter center element, Night, is a deep dive into the evils of story. The ending, Flame, is quite small, told in bits. The book ends with what seems to be a vision, where the two people light a candle in the dark, in the abyss of winter.
The desire that opens the book is of” thousands of black tree roots jutted from the world. … Stooped and listing, they gave the impression of a thousand men, women and ragged kids huddling in the snow”.
Trees that represent individuals, children who are ragged: these are worryingly dark pictures. In the twisted truth of the dreamland, Kyungha wonders:” Was this a grave? … Are those headstones”?
The vision moves on, and she finds that she is walking through liquid. Second her feet are sweaty, then she is ankle-deep, and then the “graves” are submerged, being washed away by the water, and she alone may try to preserve any that can be saved.
This sets the stage for all that is to come: proof of murders, nature turned into a period for terrible situations, a bone-chilling consciousness of pain.
Wish project
This may sound like an unpromising access point for a book, but let me tell visitors that the story offers genuine rewards. I was a contact undone by the first pages, but the beauty of the language kept me going. The intelligent, interesting portraits of the generosity, integrity and courage of the two important characters, to, provided an interesting path on which to adopt the narrative.
In the early chapters, Kyungha presents as a person suffering from PTSD. She has been flirting with death for some time. What is keeping her alive is that she can’t find a way to write what she believes to be” a proper letter of farewell, a true leavetaking”.
The elements and circumstances seem to conspire against her peace. Through the novel’s first chapters, Kyungha is surviving a hot humid summer. All she is able to do is shower, shred the drafts of her farewell letters, and lie on the floor imagining snow.
She has been brought to this point as a result of her researching and writing about a massacre in a place she names G— ( perhaps Gwangju, the site of a massacre in May 1980, which Han Kang addressed in her 2014 novel Human Acts ). Kyungha’s account of how she is – barely – managing day-to-day life reads like a textbook case of vicarious trauma. She speculates that translating the dream-image into an art work might break its grip.
Kyungha approaches Inseon, who has a long record of producing interesting if financially unviable projects. Inseon agrees to collaborate with her on this dream project. But four years go by without them ever managing to synchronise their schedules or begin the work.
Then, after some months of silence, a text from Inseon pings into Kyungha’s phone. It asks her to come to a Seoul hospital. Inseon is there, being treated for an accident involving an electric saw. She has turned to her old friend to ask Kyungha to travel to Jeju and save her budgie, which will otherwise die of thirst.
A quest
The novel then enters what can loosely be read as a quest narrative. It is now mid-winter and a wild snowstorm is on the way. Inseon’s home is in a village a long way from the airport, and snow is threatening to shut down the roads.
Nonetheless, Kyungha agrees to take up the quest. She finds herself in an unfamiliar location with a looming frightening weather event and no practical knowledge about how to reach Inseon’s home. As she struggles to reach the destination, she finds herself spiraling like the snow in this winter storm.
There is neither precision nor even clarity here: Much as the story leaps back through decades, then feels its way back to now, Kyungha stumbles through a landscape that she cannot map and plunges precipitately off the paths. Snowdrifts obscure the roads and” snowflakes resembling a flock of tens of thousands of birds appear like a mirage and sweep over the sea”.
Scratched, bruised and almost frozen, Kyungha finds herself at Inseon’s door, where she is completely isolated:” When I looked back”, she says,” the lone path that bore my deep footprints lay in silence”.
And there she remains, trapped by the weather, haunted by the stories of those she had interviewed for her book on the G— massacre. Stories of running from bullets, bodies being piled up, hiding for years in forests and caves: all the unendurable things that people nonetheless endured.
The wounds of history
The second part of the novel begins with a version of the initial dream of the sea and tree trunks that are metaphors of the dead. Kyungha wakes from this dream to find herself in a sort of ontological uncertainty. Inseon has ( impossibly ) joined her at the cottage. Kyungha can’t determine whether this is another dream, or if Inseon has died and is visiting her as a spirit, or if she herself has died is only imagining that she is alive and present.
What is not in doubt, though, is the historical record. Kyungha finds that she is not the only person who has been researching state-sanctioned massacres. Inseon has been busy investigating what is known as the April 3rd uprising and the long massacre that followed from 1947 to 1954.
This massacre was organized and undertaken by the US military and the new Republic of Korea, based on the flawed notion that the Jeju islanders were communists. It resulted in the deaths of around 30, 000 people.
Nietzsche warned that “if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you”. Han Kang’s version of this idea is, as she writes in We Do Not Part, that “looking squarely at the injury made it all the more excruciating”.
Here it is Inseon’s nightmares that dominate: This is where her family and people died and where their traces remain. But both women are carriers of nightmare stories. Both stagger under the weight. They have both looked squarely at the excruciating injuries of state-sanctioned murder and they carry the wounds of those histories.
This is an issue Han Kang has been tracing through her novels. Her stories engage, one way or another, with the problem of violence. As she writes in Human Acts, she sees the tendency to “uniform brutality” as something “imprinted in our genetic code”.
But she also notes, in her Nobel Lecture, that we humans” simultaneously stand opposite such overwhelming violence”. Yes, we do terrible things, but we also do generous and compassionate things. We live simultaneously in the scarred world of human history and in the less-damaged natural world.
We Do Not Part portrays massacres and trauma, contrasted with trees and seawater, walks in forests and glorious hymns to snow. It is a novel that depicts a beautiful world, one worth living in, and for. It is a novel that looks, perhaps too squarely, at recent history, while finding consolation in small acts of kindness and community, and in the assurance that, however we understand the phrase, we do not part.
Jen Webb is a distinguished professor of creative practice in the Faculty of Arts and Design, University of Canberra.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.