We Do Not Part by Han Kang, translated by E. Yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris (Hogarth, Random House, release date 1/21/2025)
Kyungha is a writer who’s dominated by nightmares of black human forms standing in the snow as the tide surges toward them, of massacres that send women and their children down the steep side of a well to escape death, of holding a single flaming match that could reveal the face of a mass murderer. Engulfed by these phantoms, she struggles to overcome them and to regain her life.
When a friend summons her to a hospital room, she finds the photographer and filmmaker whom she’s worked with for years, immobilized and crippled by an accident that took place when working in a rural studio. Inseon is from the island of Jeju, where she has lived alone in the company of a caged bird. Pleading with Kyungha to go to her home and give the bird food and water before it’s too late, Inseon persuades her to leave Seoul and travel to Jeju, in spite of an approaching snowstorm that threatens to make the journey impossible.
Arriving on the last flight before the storm hits, waiting beside a lonely road for the bus that will take her close to Inseon’s house, Kyungha at last begins a walk to safety that instead plummets her into a deep pit. When she emerges, she’s lost her phone and when she enters Inseon’s dark, cold house, she finds the bird is dead.
Suddenly this story slips into the hallucinatory quality of Kyungha’s nightmares. The bird that she buries returns to life. The friend whom she had left in the confinement of a hospital ward suddenly appears in the unheated house and begins to reveal the history that Inseon’s mother lived through and archived, in notebooks, letters, and newspaper articles. The massacres that have haunted Kyungha’s sleep unfold as a tragedy of death and horror, one that was covered up the minute after it took place. Bodies were buried under the runway of Jeju Airport; shot as they waded out to sea where the waves carried off their corpses; dumped into pits where the snow covered and erased them, staying invisible for thirty-four years and remaining forever anonymous.
The dead dominate in this eerie novel. But who is dead? Who’s alive? Perhaps the most vivid character is Inseon’s dead mother, forcing her history upon her daughter and Kyungha, telling her terrible stories in a voice that lives through pieces of saved paper. “Extermination was the goal.”
Extermination is what fills the history and the nightmares, wrapped in the surrealism of snowfall: Snowflakes land on the fronds of palm trees and freezing bright blossoms; snow crystals “swirl wildly as if inside a giant popcorn machine;” snow clouds emerging“like tens of thousands of white-feathered birds flying right along the horizon.” Snow extinguishes the light of a final candle and threatens the life of the one remaining match, held by a woman who may already be a ghost.
We Do Not Part is an unsettling work of art, with each sentence holding a new masterpiece of beautiful and bone-chilling words. It should be read slowly, like poetry, because the narrative is unbearably painful if approached in the way novels are usually consumed. Han Kang combines the supernatural with the inhuman, history with its denial, the living with the dead, as she blurs every boundary line, with the finality of snow.~Janet Brown
Han Kang received the 2024 Nobel Prize for Literature five days after this review was posted.