I got a copy of this through NetGalley so was very excited to have an early read. I always find Han Kang books challenging on an intellectual level so this was no different. What she also does beautifully though is retain the narrative element of the book. At the end of the day there is a story and one you become invested in very quickly.

Han Kang's latest book is profound and extraordinary, she is a deserving Nobel Prize winner, as she proves here. It is a razor sharp, mesmerising, poetic and lyrical exposure of the darkest side of humanity, the massacres carried out in the rabid hunt for 'communists', which the organisers and perpetrators would have wanted buried and unacknowledged in South Korea, where they are supported by the US. There is immense power in this haunting and harrowing tragedies, an anguished history and storytelling, the beautifully crafted language, surreal tones of the dream like state, we see that nothing and no-one disappears, in this unsettled and disturbing land of ghosts, birds, trees, silence, secrets, desperation, and snow with its capacity to obliterate and threaten life, the conscience and the conscious, the annihilation and terrors go deep, with the killing even of children,

Kang looks the past head on, straight in the eye, seeing and expressing the complexities of the human psyche, shining a much needed light on the nature of intergenerational trauma, and the inescapable repercussions that follow. Kyungha goes to visit her friend, Inseon, in a Seoul hospital after an accident chopping wood whilst working on her art installation. Not wanting her pet bird to die, Inseon asks Kyungha to ensure it does not die of starvation in her home on Jeju island. Caught in a snowstorm, facing dangers, Kyungha stumbles unexpectedly on the nation's and her friend's darkest history, resulting in the documentation, and unearthing of memories, that begin to place value on the huge numbers of lives lost and scarred.

Kang holds glimmers of hope amidst the despair, with her focus on human connections, love, friendship, to move towards find some degree of peace, through memorialisation, art, memories, and the uncovering of truth, South Korea's real political history and what governments are willing to do to its people. What humans can do to other human beings can be sickening, an agonising nightmare unfortunately the human race repeats time and time again, with its inability to learn nothing apparently from history, something sadly illustrated by our contemporary world. This is not a book you will forget in a hurry, I can feel its insistent call to revisit again already. I strongly urge readers who have never encountered Kang to try this, you will not regret it. Highly recommended. Many thanks to the publisher for an ARC.

Whenever I bring up Human Acts, most of the people I talk are surprised to hear that South Korea had, until very recently, a brutal history of suppression and violence against its own people. Hundreds of thousands were massacred by successive South Korean governments during and since the Korean War. Westerners often identify that kind of violence with North Korea, and, especially in the age of K-Pop and K-Dramas, it is hard to reconcile the glitzy image of the country with the sort of brutality Han Kang's books masterfully bear witness to.

We Do Not Part is a spiritual successor to Human Acts. It focuses on the afterlives of the massacres in Jeju Island during the 1948-49 uprising. Similar to Human Acts, Han Kang employs an innovative structure, but unlike Human Acts, the narrator and the narrative are not directly related to the uprising. The narrator is an author who has recently researched and written a book about a different uprising. Kyungha, the narrator, is suffering from the aftershocks of having experienced the traumas of the event they were writing about as a part of the writing process. Her friend Inseon experiences a terrible accident, and as a result her house in a remote part of Jeju is left unattended. Inseon asks Kyungha to immediately go there and care for her pet bird, who would die without a human looking after it.

The first half of the book follows Kyungha's meticulously written journey to Jeju through an enormous snowstorm. There is very little direct engagement with the main themes of the book in the first half. Han Kang masterfully writes quite an abstract narrative, weaving together the themes of dread, duty and fate. The second half confronts the Jeju uprising much more directly, as we follow Inseon's methodical research into her family's story. Part II reads almost like a journalistic investigation, providing a contrast with Part I, reminiscent of an arthouse film. The narrative is held together by a sense of foreboding and the haunting setting of the empty remote house. The novel really reminded me of Pedro Paramo: we follow an outsider coming into a deserted remote location possessed by its brutal past, everyone we meet might be dead already and the weather - sweltering heat in Pedro Paramo and the snowstorm in We Do Not Part - is a character in itself.

We Do Not Part is a novel about memory and human brutality. Han Kang revisits some of the themes of Human Acts, such as questioning who the memories belong to, critiquing extractive practices of interviewers, documentary filmmakers and oral historians, and discussing just how long a shadow events of the past can have. Folliwng Han Kang's Nobel Prize this year, many commentators were quick to point out that Korea ostracised Han Kang and now tries to reclaim her as a national hero, and having read We Do Not Part and Human Acts I can see why the government and the society at large would want to silence Kang's voice. She is absolutely unflinching in recovering the stories of the oppressed and questioning many narratives of Korean identity.

In We Do Not Part, one of the side plots concerns Inseon's documentary about atrocities in Vietnam committed by Korean soldiers fighting for the USA. In a memorable scene, Inseon, a Korean documentary maker, visits a remote village in Vietnam trying to interview survivors of sexual assault committed by Korean soldiers. Now an elderly woman, the survivor is pressured by others, including some Vietnamese, to tell her story, partially motivated by the fact that Inseon has come so far, from Korea itself, to hear her story. Kang brilliantly teases out the power dynamics and the complexity of bearing witness and documenting memories, as this old woman is pressured to relive what happened to her by someone from the country that committed the atrocity in the first place.

There are many brilliant moments like that in We Do Not Part. What I appreciate in it the most in the seamless merging of form and content. It does not just explore the themes and send a 'message' (although the factual message cannot be clearer). It is, first and foremost, a work of literary art, written in gorgeous prose conveying entrapping atmosphere. It is an achingly beautiful book for many reads and re-reads.

Thank you. NetGalley, and the publisher, for the review copy.

A lot of this deffo went over my head.

I felt that the two stories/sections didn’t marry together very well and I would have liked there to be a clearer thread between the two.

There were some really interesting themes here around the snow, light, shadows etc. and it was beautifully written.

I think covering historical events like this through fiction isn’t easy to do, but it was done well here.

That being said, a lot of that second half dragged because it started to feel a bit info dumpy.

I have difficulty to review this book. The first part was easy to follow but it became more abstract and a little too confusing for my liking. One strong image will stay with me from this book though (the snow flakes falling on someone face). I think this book is still a beautiful way to discuss violent past and although it's an history I don't know a lot about, I still have the feeling I learned a little about what happened there and then. Thank you Penguin General UK for providing this book for review consideration via NetGalley. All opinions are my own.

Stunningly beautiful prose, narrative, writing, everything. Han Kang, being the winner of the most recent Nobel Prize for literature is just like it should be - I'm not even a bit surprised about that. Having read this in the original text was already a spectacular treat and experience even though I can't say I am fluent in Korean. But this English translation simply can't be more perfect. Only endless amount of high praises, no complaints at all. It was better than I expected in every way. Also, big fan of the translator, I am so happy it all panned out this way . I think Han Kang's strength lies in her writing about human fragilities and vulnerabilities - uncovering historical traumas with such tenderness and care - I can't think of any writer living today who does it like her. She claims to be a fan of Sebald, and it just makes so much sense, that. The story in this particular Han Kang novel is one that should be told, or rather re-told better, and I think she has done it so beautifully and respectfully - it's highly remarkable. Brilliant. I can type out lines and lines of praises to no ends. I need at least a dozen copies of this to give out to dear ones. A bit too early to say, but quite possibly the best book or at least my favourite book that I've read this year.

My first read left me a star rating between 3 and 4.
Kyungha flies to Jeju Island, which has a traumatic past, to care for her friend Inseon's bird.
Through snow and Kyungha's psyche and later, imagination, we learn more about this traumatic event - to put it more clearly, the Jeju, April 3 Massacre.
I loved the employment of snow as a portal and symbol, and I liked the second part more, due to its creative narrative quality. Yet, the first part was much needed to set the facts. I found the prose to be richer in the second part too.
I am tending more towards a 4 stars because of how important the themes are.
I certainly need to come back to this one and read it again to absorb all the metaphors and facts.

What Han does in this book is articulate a harrowing story but to express it through a delicately lucid and austere prose. Strikingly, she allows this novel to take on the allusive techniques more usually found in poetry, and shows herself (again) as an exquisite craftsperson of this dense and sophisticated mode of storytelling.

The explicit story is an excavation of the Jeju 4.3 massacre of 1948 in South Korea and the trauma that has ensued on both a personal and national level. The story thematises issue of suffering, intergenerational pain and the unending nature of loss and absence, and attempts towards memorialisation as both a move towards some kind of partial healing as well as acknowledgement of history and the way the past always has a presence in our present.

But what really raises this book in my personal pantheon, is the craft. Han uses metaphors and symbolism to great effect without overloading the text. Snow, birds, trees contain a multiplicity of meanings, some of which also perform as intertexts to Han's other works. Strikingly, they also have shifting values: snow is white and pure and peaceful, even as it is a potential giveaway of a father and daughter's footsteps as they try to find refuge in a cave from the militias seeking their death. It acts as a symbol for the covering over of inconvenient history that governments seek to eradicate from memory; and it figures disappearance as material flakes hit the damp ground and dissolve, representing the absence of family relations and executed bodies thrown into the sea to be swept away. It is especially powerful as a figure for reiteration: the natural cycle of snow-water-mist and the way that reflects humanity's inability to get past violence, war and struggle: 'Who's to say the snow dusting my hands now isn't the same snow that had gathered on their faces?' This sense of haunting, of the intersection of time, is one which permeates the book.

The other system of imagery which worked so well for me is that of bloody fingers: Inseon cuts off her fingertips when working on an art installation as memorialisation piece; in the hospital a nurse has to stick needles into her open wounds in order to keep the nerves alive. But this also recalls moments of torture and also instances of love and desperation: Inseon's mother cut her own fingers to drop warm blood into her dying sister in an attempt to keep her alive, and would prick Inseon's finger with a needle and rub her belly when she had disturbed nightmares. These sorts of dualities of imagery give a gorgeous coherence to the book on a sub-textual level and involve the reader in the hermeneutics of the text.

The title, We Do Not Part in English, is both the title of the art project being contemplated within the story as a monument to the massacre but also refers to the way in which human connections endure: at the heart of the narrative is the friendship of the two women, Kyungha and Inseon, who tell this story as alternate voices with Kyungha as main narrator and Inseon as inserts, but there is also the implication of the lasting remembrance of the executed who do not disappear from personal or collective memories - and the book itself is, on one level an act of artistic recollection and memorialisation. While the immediate concern is with a specific incident in the history of Korea, there is a sense that Han is also thinking more widely of other histories of mass executions, atrocities and, possibly, genocide. Like Sebald, she widens the margins of her story to take a view on humanity's inescapable, apparently, inhumaneness - but does this through a consummate artistry that offers some kind of hope or, at least, doesn't end in complete despair.

I received an ARC of this (thank you, Penguin and Netgalley!) just days before Han was awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize for Literature and this is a fine book to introduce her to potentially new audiences.

"People say 'light as snow'. But snow has its own heft, which is the weight of this drop of water.
People say 'light as a bird'. But birds too have their weight.

눈처럼 가볍다고 사람들은 말한다. 그러나 눈에도 무게가 있다, 이 물방울만큼.
새처럼 가볍다고도 말한다. 하지만 그것들에게도 무게가 있다."

From the deserving winner of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life.

We Do Not Part (2025) is the translation by e. yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris of 작별하지 않는다 by 한강 (Han Kang), and a book that epitomises the prose and themes that led the Nobel Committee to choose here as the new Nobel lauraete (see below for their more detailed take).

This novel won the Prix Médicis étranger for its French translation and the English version must be a strong contender for a double-win for Han Kang in the International Booker.

The novel can be thought of as part of a trilogy linked by trauma, and by images of snow, with the powerful 소년이 온다 (2014), translated as Human Acts (2016) by Deborah Smith and the exquisitely poetic 흰 (2016), translated by Smith as The White Book (2017). I also believe this novel was originally going to be a short-story, the third of a a 'Snow Trilogy' with the two short stories, yet to appear in English, 눈 한 송이가 녹는 동안 (2015) ['While A Snowflake Melts'] and 작별 (2018) ['Farewell'], as the narrator of this novel comments:

"I'd written a story titled 'Farewell', a story about a woman of snow who melts away under sleet. But that can't be my actual, final farewell."

Han Kang herself has described this book as 지극한 사랑에 대한 소설 - a novel about profound love, and one that followed on from her experience after writing 소년이 온다 (Human Acts) as explained in the autobiographical opening to We Do Not Part.

We Do Not Part is narrated by Kyungha (경하), a novelist, and the initial sections follow the author's own biography. Kyungha, like the author, completed a novel in 2014 based on the massacre that followed the May 18, 1980 Gwangju uprising ('오일팔' as the events are simply known in Korea, i.e. May 18), in 한강's case 소년이 온다 / Human Acts. But far from purging each of visions of violence they were haunted by further dreams:

"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?

학살과 고문에 대해 쓰기로 마음먹었으면서, 언젠가 고통을 뿌리칠 수 있을 거라고, 모든 흔적들을 손쉽게 여읠 수 있을 거라고, 어떻게 나는 그토록 순진하게-뻔뻔스럽게-바라고 있었던 것일까?"

For both Kyungha, and 한강, this took the form of a very specific visual image, which opens the novel:

"Sparse snow was falling.

I stood on flat land that edged up a low hill. Along the brow of this hill and down its visible face to the seam of the plain, thousands of black tree trunks jutted from the earth. They varied in height, like a crowd of people ranging in age, and were about as thick as railway sleepers, though nowhere near as straight. Stooped and listing, they gave the impression of a thousand men, women and haggard children huddling in the snow.

Was this a graveyard? I wondered. Are these gravestones?

I walked past the torsos – treetops lopped off, exposed cross sections stippled with snowflakes that resembled salt crystals; I passed the prostrating barrows behind them. My feet stilled as I noticed the sensation of water underfoot. That’s strange, I thought. Within moments the water was up to my ankles. I looked back. What I saw astonished me: the far horizon turned out to be the shoreline. And the sea was crashing in.

The words tumbled from my lips: Who would bury people in such a place?"

She realises that this image isn't of Gwangju, and over time it leads her to another infamous massacre earlier in Korea's post World War II history, in the aftermath of the Jeju uprising on April 3, 1940 (제주 4·3 사건), with up to 30,000, men, women and children, slaughtered by the US-backed mainland government forces, around 10% of the population, and a similar number fleeing to Japan.

In Korea this story was largely supressed during the military dictatorship, and the first literary treatment was in the 1978 novel 순이삼촌 by 현기영 (Hyun Ki-youn) - Aunt Suni or Sun-i Samch'on in its English translations - which at the time it was published led to censorship and punishment of the author. There is, I think, a neat nod to this work when Kyungha's friend Inseon (인선) explains how to converse with Jeju people:

"Inseon had told me to address older people here as samchun. Only outsiders say ajossi or ajumoni, halmoni or haraboji, she said. If you start off by calling them samchun, even if you can't string together a sentence in Jeju-mal, they're likely to be less guarded, thinking you've lived on the island for a good while.2

The other key character in the story is Inseon, a colleague from Kyungha's first job, like the author as a reporter at a magazine, over time a close friend, and an artist and film maker.

The novel rather jumps around in time but we learn than Inseon and Kyungha had conceived of an art-project which would be hosted on some land in the mountains of Jeju which Inseon had inherited, where they would replicate Kyungha's vision by planting one hundred black logs to resemble, and remember, those who lost their lives in 1948:

"I wanted to ask you – what if we did something about it together? I asked Inseon. What if you and I were to plant logs in a field, dress them in black ink and film them under falling snow?

Well, we’d have to get started before autumn ends, Inseon answered after listening to all I had to say. She was dressed in the black hanbok of mourning, her chin-length hair tied back with a white rubber band and her face earnest and composed. She said to plant ninety-nine logs in a field, we had to be sure the ground wasn’t frozen. She suggested we gather people to help with the planting by mid November at the latest, and said we could use the abandoned tract of land she’d inherited from her father, which no one used. Does the ground freeze here too? I asked. Of course, the uplands are frozen throughout the winter, she said."

Crucially Inseon's family home is away from the coast, as during October 1948 the government/mainland authorities decreed: “We impose quarantine on the area further inland than 5km from the coastline of Jeju Island and in the mountainous area from October 20 to the end of military action to sweep the unpatriotic extremists who committed unpardonable atrocities hiding in Mt. Halla”, with those in the interior subject to military action and execution.

But the right time to complete the project never quite comes, and Kyungha decides to abandon it, the two friends drifting apart. However, one December day she receives a simple text message from Inseon that simply reads Kyunghaya (경하야), the 'ya' a suffix used with close acquaintances. Inseon is in a hospital in Seoul, having severed her fingers in an accident in her Jeju studio, and asks Kyungha to visit her urgently.

It transpires that Inseon had been continuing with the project, indeed the accident came while working on the wood. She was rushed to hospital on the mainland for an operation to reattach her fingers, and she is desparate for Kyungha to go, that very day, to Inseon's Jeju home to feed the remaining one of her two pet birds, who she is convinced will not last another day without water and food.

Travelling to Jeju, Kyungha is caught in a snowstorm, which, give the journey involves the airport bus, followed by a local bus in to the inland and the slopes of Hallasan, and then a trek which would take 30 minutes at the best of the time, places her trip in some jeopardy, and indeed at one stage she falls down a slope, possibly losing consciousness briefly:

"This path I’ve landed on and slipped down by accident, this bed of earth in which I am lying, is most likely the dried-up stream. A thin layer of ice must have set over its channel, a pile of snow heaped up over that. There are hardly any rivers or creeks on this volcanic island, and only occasionally during heavy rains or heavy snow do flowing streams appear. The village used to be divided along the border of this ephemeral stream, Inseon once told me on a walk. A cluster of forty houses, give or take, had stood on the other side, and when the evacuation orders went out in 1948, they were all set on fire, the people in them slaughtered, the village incinerated."

She eventually recovers (or at least the novel narrates that she does) and finds Inseon's home, only to find that the bird she has come to save has already passed away, and she buries it, with the snow still falling heavily in the garden.

But the next day, when she awakens late in the afternoon, the bird seems to be back - and then she is also visited by Inseon, who she factually knows can not be there as she is still in the hospital. The second half of the novel takes on a dream-like quality as Kyung-ha is led by Inseon through various memories and archives of her family's history and the events in Jeju, which took place when Inseon's mother was 13:

"She told me about how, when she was young, soldiers and police had murdered everyone in her village. My mum had been in her last year of elementary school and my aunt was seventeen. The two of them had been away on an errand at a distant cousin’s house, which was how they managed to avoid the same fate. The next day, having heard the news, the sisters returned to the village and wandered the grounds of the elementary school all afternoon. Searching for the bodies of their father and mother, their older brother and eight year old sister. They looked over the bodies that had fallen every which way on top of one another and found that, overnight, a thin layer of snow had covered and frozen upon each face. They couldn’t tell anyone apart because of the snow, and since my aunt couldn’t bring herself to brush it away with her bare hands, she used a handkerchief to wipe each face clean. [...] That day, she came to understand something clearly. That when people died, their bodies went cold. Snow remained on their cheeks, and a thin layer of bloody ice set over their faces."

Inseon's great-uncle was arrested and then lost in the prison system, likely executed at the Gyeongsan Cobalt Mine (경산 코발트광산 학살 사건) although rumours persisted of escapees, and Inseon's mother went on to marry someone who did survive imprisonment. Inseon's mother also led a campaign to discover what happened to those caught up in the events, and her archives, which we explore with Kyungha and Inseon, also speak to events such as the 1950 Bodo League massacre (보도연맹 학살), with Inseon's own films covering other atrocities, including those inflicted by Korean troops in Vietnam.

But at the heart of the story is the profound love which the author highlights of Inseon's mother for her family and between the two friends. And the symbolism of the snow:

"The snow that fell over this island and also in other ancient, faraway places could all have condensed together inside those clouds. When, at five years old, I reached out to touch my first snow in G—, and when, at thirty, I was caught in a sudden rain shower that left me drenched as I biked along the riverside in Seoul, when the snow obscured the faces of the hundreds of children, women and elders on the schoolyard here on Jeju seventy years ago, when muddy water flooded the chicken coop as hens and baby chicks flapped their wings and rain ricocheted off the gleaming brass pump — who's to say those raindrops and crumbling snow crystals and thin layers of bloodied ice are not one and the same, that the snow settling over me now isn't that very water?"

Another powerful work from an author now recognised, via the Nobel, as one of the world's finest living writers.

I found the writing of this to be quite stagnant and lacking emotion for such a heavy topic, however I did enjoy the main character and her story. I found the book moved rather quickly which made for an entertaining read, despite the writing style not being my favourite. The setting was also interesting and added another layer to the story.

We Do Not Part is a haunting and beautifully crafted narrative that intertwines the themes of friendship, memory, and trauma. When Kyungha receives an urgent message from her friend Inseon, who has been hospitalised after a serious accident, she rushes to Jeju Island to care for Inseon’s pet bird. This journey, however, is not merely a physical one; it becomes a profound exploration of the past and the weight of history that lingers in the present.

As Kyungha battles a fierce snowstorm to reach Inseon’s home, the icy wind and swirling snow serve as metaphors for the emotional coldness and isolation that permeate their lives. Once she arrives, Kyungha uncovers the dark family history that Inseon has long kept buried. Through dreams, memories, and meticulously assembled archives, the narrative unravels a tragic massacre that haunts the island—a poignant reminder of the scars left by historical atrocities.

The writing is lyrical and evocative, transporting readers into the heart of a winter landscape that mirrors the characters' emotional journeys. The friendship between Kyungha and Inseon is tenderly portrayed, underscoring the importance of connection in the face of overwhelming darkness.

We Do Not Part serves as both a tribute to the power of imagination and a call to remember the past rather than bury it. The story resonates deeply, reminding us that the echoes of history still shape our lives today. This is more than just a novel; it is a powerful exploration of memory and the enduring bonds of friendship that can illuminate even the darkest paths.

Read more at The Secret Bookreview.

Not my favourite of Kang’s books - the two stories (Kyungha’s journey to Inseon’s house, Inseon’s family story about the Jeju massacre) didn’t really resonate together as a whole story for me. That being said, I did like the prose, especially in the first third of the book - the descriptions of Kyungha’s journey through the snow was beautiful and evocative. I also think the Jeju massacre was handled beautifully for such an upsetting topic handled using fictional characters. For me these two strands didn’t come together in a satisfying way, it felt more like two separate stories and I wanted more resolution.

We Do Not Part follows Kyungha who is called to her friend’s hospital bedside. Her friend, Inseon is bedridden after being injured in a wood chopping accident. Kyungha is asked to go to Inseon’s home to feed her pet bird. She gets lost in a snowstorm and starts to consider the massacre 70 years before where 30,000 Jeju civilians were murdered.

This just wasn’t to my taste. It deals with a heavy topic but I just found the writing to be quite robotic and maybe that’s because of the translation. However, I can see many fans of Han Kang enjoying this.

A very slow, melancholic tale with a poetic writing style, that creates a strong sense of atmosphere, but let me down on pace, plot, and structure.

What worked for me:
* Inseon’s character was interesting: I loved how much she cared for her little birds and how interested she was in the world.
* The second part of the story, when Kyungha makes their way to Inseon’s house, was harrowing and tense. This was probably my favourite section because the pace was tight, there was a palpable sense of danger, and it offers us more balanced glimpses into Kyungha’s mind outside of the depression we’ve seen so far.
* The descriptions of winter and snow storms were expertly done.
* I liked the folklore elements.
* Some very powerful writing and phrases.

What I wasn’t so keen on:
* I found the Kyungha’s hopelessly bleak inner monologue difficult. The story really struggled to keep my attention until Inseon arrived on the scene and the pace and mood lifted a bit.
* The writing style was detached in a way that I struggled to connect with our characters emotionally.
* Pace was too slow, too repetitive, and too meandering for me
* They might’ve been going for a dream-like, hazy effect but the time and content jumps within sections were confusing and pulled me out of interesting arcs with unnecessary digression.
* The mood was bleak and melancholy creating a dark mood that I didn’t enjoy immersing myself in.
* I appreciated Kang shedding a light on them, but the detailed historical atrocities, and our characters’ personal connections with them, made for upsetting reading that weighed very heavily.

I wouldn’t say I enjoyed this (it’s painfully sad) but I am glad I read it. I’d heard such great things about Han Kang and was curious about her style. As a novella, this might’ve been emotional and impactful; but, as a novel, I found it repetitive, slow, and a little too bleak.

Is it somehow incomplete, the parting?
Is it deferred? The goodbye - or the closure? Indifintely?

We Do Not Part deals with a dark part of Korea's story, the Jeju massacre. And it builds into the bigger discourse of how contemporary South Korea was forged in ash, blood, and divisions that predated the North/South split.

Content warning for suicidal ideation and everything war/genocide (rape, killing children, torture, etc.). It's a harrowing read. It feels like a 'there and back again' with Han Kang, she seems to have taken it upon herself to expose Korea's bloodiest history.

I especially appreciated how she 'censors' the names of the places, which kinda reflects into how controversial Jeju's massacre and Gwangju's uprising remain as of this day. There's a much bigger discussion here about what to call it - Jeju's genocide, massacre, uprising? And I just loved how she didn't shy away from gritty details.

The book has two parts of the same story, each with a different focus, which then collide into a third part that wraps it up. The first part is about Kyungha and Inseon. Kyungha's struggles with depression and suicidal ideation when her friend Inseon gets into an accident and asks for a favor. That little favor turns into a difficult (and life-threatening, if I may say) trip that I think helps her find purpose. The second part is... a dream, a vision, or reality. Kyungha, still in Jeju, uncovers clippings and writings about the Jeju massacre.

The first part, I hated. It was dull, long, and insipid. The second part was just emotional and harrowing, and I love how the setting was just confusing (where/when are we?).

Han Kang’s intense, intricate narrative has the feel of a ghost story, forged from unsettling encounters with the spectres of South Korea’s turbulent past. Han opens with an eerie sequence, taken from the dreams that partly inspired her to write this. Author Kyungha – a version of Han – is living in isolation, tormented by debilitating headaches and destabilising nightmares. Recurring nightmares she attributes to the disturbing content of research undertaken for a recent book about the Gwangju uprising – similar to Han’s Human Acts. Macabre fantasies dominate Kyungha’s sleeping and, increasingly, waking thoughts. She’s unable to move freely through surrounding streets, visualising soldiers poised to swoop, intent on capturing her and inflicting searing pain. But Kyungha’s attempts to retreat from the outside world are abruptly curtailed by a summons from old friend, Inseon.

Inseon’s settled in her childhood home on Jeju Island but a serious accident’s brought her to a specialist treatment centre in Seoul. Inseon needs a favour, alone in Jeju is her small bird Ama, likely to die if Kyungha can’t reach her in time. Through blustering winds and a seemingly-incessant snowstorm, Kyungha sets out on a gruelling trek to Inseon’s house. An existential journey leading her away from the desolation of Gwangju towards the traumascape of Inseon’s Jeju. Inseon’s experiences of Jeju are shaped by her mother’s. Jeongsim, Inseon’s mother, survived what’s known as Jeju 4:3 or “Sa-Sam.” But most of her family died and her brother was disappeared.

Jeju 4:3 points to massacres that took place in April, 1948. But the killings weren’t confined to April, Jeju 4:3 encompasses atrocities that stretched back into preceding months and continued in the months ahead. A political uprising sparked by developments involving the governing of South Korea, and the policies of the US administration then overseeing it, was brutally suppressed by a grouping of soldiers, police, and right-wing militias. Ostensibly a hunt for “left-wing” guerrilla units, the underlying goal was to eradicate “leftists.” Around 30,000 people were eventually slaughtered, roughly 10% of Jeju’s population – a place considered overrun by “commie” subversives and sympathisers. During this “scorched earth” campaign whole villages were razed to the ground. No form of terror was considered too extreme, from torture to gang-rape to mass murder - victims included children and new-born babies.

The legacy of Jeju 4:3 dominates the later stages of Han’s narrative. At Inseon’s house, Kyungha’s confronted with distressing documentation compiled by Jeongsim and later added to by Inseon. And Kyungha realises the devastating scenes invading her dreams originated on Jeju. When Kyungha comes face to face with Inseon, still in Seoul yet somehow simultaneously on Jeju, the boundary between real and imagined fractures. Han interweaves surreal episodes featuring Kyungha and Inseon with extracts from the testimonies of Jeju 4:3 survivors – building on existing oral histories. Haunted individuals, they’re tortured by the knowledge that somewhere, in mass graves yet to be discovered, lie the unclaimed bodies of family members from grandfathers to grandmothers, uncles, siblings or cousins.

Although it’s fine as a standalone, Han’s narrative’s shot through with traces of earlier work. Most obviously Kyungha’s writing, and Han’s subject matter, form a bridge to Human Acts; while the symbolic use of trees and plants echoes aspects of The Vegetarian. Snow and snow-related imagery surfaces throughout – so much so it feels a little overworked at times. Han’s use of snow recalls passages from The White Book - as well as untranslated pieces set in snowy landscapes – conjuring notions of mortality and loss. But here, for Han, snow’s also intended to represent “softness and light,” tempering the “darkness” of her meditations on genocide and mass killing.

Although Han’s exploration of these topics stems from Jeju 4:3, she also references the extermination of suspected “reds” on the mainland in Busan and Daegu. But she goes beyond these too, invested in questions of what might drive humans in do barbaric things, and what distinguishes those who do from those who don’t or won’t. She’s equally interested in potential methods for addressing the past: how to heal history’s wounds: the transformation of individual mourning into a collective response possessing active political force; opportunities for solidarity and the co-creation of rituals which open up possibilities for remembrance that goes beyond gesture. Han’s comments about the novel, together with its conclusion, suggest cautious optimism. Unlike Human Acts which steered her towards despair, she found writing this cathartic.

The translation reads smoothly, although there’s not always a marked distinction between sections in Jeju dialect and those in standard Korean, the incorporation of terms of address used on Jeju offers some clues – for instance “abang” for father instead of “abeoji.” The structure and texture of the novel sometimes reminded me of Greek Lessons although it’s more collage-like. Austere, understated prose is interrupted by bursts of arresting lyricism, oneiric sequences are juxtaposed with sharply-focused, docu-style accounts. Although it wasn’t a problem for me, I think the pacing might be an issue for some. The novel took Han several years to complete. The first half initially appeared in serial form in a quarterly magazine, as a result some elements may seem slightly repetitive, excessively detailed, and/or drawn-out compared to the rest of the book. Personally, I found the rhythm of the earlier sections hypnotic. I liked Han’s willingness to experiment, even when I didn’t think it quite paid off. But overall, I found this immensely powerful and incredibly compelling. Translated by e. yaewon & Paige Aniyah Morris.