When Han Kang published her International Booker-winning The Vegetarian (2015), translated by Deborah Smith, about a South Korean housewife who gives up meat and wants to become a tree, the novel slotted into a wave of English-language fiction about female appetites and male control. But the books that came next were harder to pin down. After Human Acts, about the 1980 massacre of student protesters in Han’s native Gwangju, came The White Book, in which a Han-like novelist reflects on the death of her baby sister while musing on wartime Warsaw. Then came 2023’s Greek Lessons, riddling to the point of opacity, about a divorced poet’s inability to communicate.
We Do Not Part, Han’s first novel to be translated since winning the Nobel prize for literature last year, has elements of all these books. Stark as well as ethereal, chronologically discontinuous, full of nested narratives – often structured as remembered conversations about remembered conversations – it exhumes historical horror but also swerves into hallucinatory magic realism without breaking the plausibly autofictional frame with which it begins.
Our narrator is the Seoul-based author Kyungha, whose life has gone off the rails after publishing a novel that sounds a lot like Human Acts (it’s about “a massacre at G–”). Even watching passersby is traumatic, reminding her of life’s fragility (“The flesh, organs, bones, breaths passing before my eyes all held within them the potential to snap, to cease – so easily, and by a single decision”). She can’t shake the memory of the survivors she wrote about, putting herself in the place of mothers who sheltered from gunfire with their children in a well. “In retrospect it baffles me. Having decided to write about mass killings and torture, how could I have so naively – brazenly – hoped to soon shirk off the agony of it, to so easily be bereft of its traces?”
This is all happening at an unspecified point in the recent near-present. Kyungha, having previously held down a job to support her family, now doesn’t have to – not only because her daughter’s no longer a child, but also because of some coyly hinted-at domestic rift in the wake of her breakdown. She’s struggling to think of anyone she can name in her will – a symbol of her predicament – when out of the blue comes a text from Inseon, an old colleague from her journalism days. A visual artist living alone on Jeju Island, about 300 miles away, she’s now in hospital in Seoul after an accident at her studio, and she needs Kyungha to go and take care of her abandoned pet bird – a request Kyungha accepts, despite the hazardous snowbound trek it entails.
Thus does the novel’s musing give way to a quixotic rescue mission (“Inseon had told me that to save her I had to get her water within the day. But when does the day end for a bird?”), shifting in tone yet further once Kyungha arrives only to find Inseon – or a vision of her – already there, and ready this time to elaborate on the horror that their previous conversations only circled: the state’s mass murder of civilians in Jeju during anti-communist violence in the late 1940s, prior to the Korean war, a bloody history that scarred Inseon’s family, not least her late mother, whom she nursed through dementia.
The harrowing testimonies she presents Kyungha ultimately constitute We Do Not Part’s main business. In contrast to Human Acts, the stories of violence don’t come to us via narratorial recreation, exactly; they instead emerge solely from quotation in the form of interviews with the eyewitnesses and relatives whose accounts Kyungha hears from Inseon and then passes to us – a storytelling technique that, while no less a performance on Han’s part, gives the impression of being less presumptuous, more ethically scrupulous.
When Han won the Nobel, she said she couldn’t celebrate amid war in Gaza and Ukraine. John Banville puckishly responded by saying the committee should take back the award, but it would be hard to read We Do Not Part and not think her words heartfelt. Even at its most seemingly inessential – witness the repeated lingering descriptions of snowflakes – the book insists quietly on the necessity to pay attention, to never turn away, to look, to see. As a message, it risks appearing somewhat frictionless, even self-serving, offering reward without cost, but it’s worth remembering how this strange and unsettling novel begins: with the nightmare-haunted protagonist, alone.
We Do Not Part by Han Kang is published by Hamish Hamilton (£18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
