Han Kang, We Do Not Part (2021, translated e. yaewon & Paige Aniyah Morris, Hamish Hamilton 2025)
Before the Book Club meeting: Han Kang was awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature, so her most recent book to be translated into English seemed a good choice for the Book Club.
The book falls into at least three parts. (Spoilers ahead.)
Part One: The narrator, who is experiencing suicidal depression, receives an urgent request from a friend, Inseon, to come to her in hospital. When she arrives, she finds Inseon has done a terrible injury to her hand and is receiving frequent, excruciatingly painful treatment, graphic descriptions of which are interspersed with a history of their friendship and their artistic collaborations. Inseon asks the narrator to go to her house on the remote island of P– and feed her pet bird, who will otherwise die.
Pat Two: The narrator makes the arduous journey to Inseon’s house, the final stage of it on foot through a blizzard. When she arrives, the bird is dead. Though she herself has barely survived her ordeal, she immediately buries the bird out in the snow.
Part Three: While the ghost of the bird casts flittering shadows around the walls, Inseon turns up, with an uninjured hand. Evidently she is some kind of supernatural projection of the living person still back there in the hospital, though the narrator suspects at one stage that both she and Inseon are actually dead. Anyhow, Inseon guides the narrator through a number of documents that record a terrible massacre committed during the Korean War, apparently with US connivance, and the decades-long attempt by surviving relatives to have the massacre acknowledged.
At the level of narrative, I didn’t understand the book. When the exhausted narrator goes back out into the snow to bury the bird without even putting on warm clothes, I nearly stopped reading, and from then on my disbelief remained unsuspended. But as the story of the massacres emerged from the piles of documents, I was glad to be learning about a part of history I’d been completely ignorant of. On the other hand, given that the information is embedded in an unabashedly unrealistic narrative, I’m left not knowing how much of the massacre story is itself fiction. In effect, then, the book is a signpost pointing its readers to the need for further research.
WIkipedia has a minimalist entry about the Sancheong–Hamyang massacre of 7 February 1951, in which 705 civilians were killed, 85% of them women, children and elderly people. The files concerning the massacre, Wikipedia confirms, were not found until February 2006. That is the emotional heart of this novel: I have no idea how the story of the injury, the blizzard and the dead bird fit together with it.
The meeting:
I wasn’t the only one perplexed by this book. We were pretty well unanimous that we wouldn’t recommend it to friends, even though there is some beautiful writing in it. We were divided on the question of whether we would want to read anything else by Han Kang,
The narrator’s ordeal in the blizzard, we all agreed, is compelling.
One valiant soul found rich metaphor in the account of Inseon’s injury and treatment: her severed fingers represent the divided state of Korea and the painful injection every three minutes suggests that the process of reunion will involve sustained, painful work. My literal-mindedness at first rebelled at such a reading, but maybe it’s there for readers with a Korean cultural background, who I expect are also better equipped for the ghost-not-ghost parts of the narrative.
I wasn’t the only one who had done some research into the history that is the subject of the book’s final movement. Whereas I had looked up a single Wikipedia entry, S– had read a number of articles on the Korean War – but, she said, she ended up more confused than when she started
We discussed this book along with Ferdia Lennon’s Glorious Exploits. Both books build fictions around historical events, but no one felt compelled by Glorious Exploits to study up on the Peloponnesian War.
The Book Club met on Gadigal land. I wrote the blog post on Wangal and Gadigal land where just now the sun is shining from a cloudless sky and the wind has died down. I gratefully acknowledge the Elders past and present who have cared for this beautiful country for millennia.
Me fail? I fly! 