Every year, there is enormous speculation about who will win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Will it be a world-renowned author such as Toni Morrison, Doris Lessing or Kazuo Ishiguro? Or will it be a journeyman toiling in relative obscurity, such as the Tanzanian-English novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah, who received the honour for his “uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism?” Philip Roth, James Joyce, Jorge Luis Borges, George Orwell and our own Janet Frame were all shortlisted but never winners of the coveted prize.
In 2024, all bets were on that Chinese author Can Xue would be the winner. To everyone’s surprise, the honour was presented to South Korean author Han Kang “for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life”. It was the first time the prize had been awarded to a South Korean writer.
Han was a relatively young 54 when she received this accolade, only rising to global acclaim in 2016 after her novel The Vegetarian won the International Booker Prize. In it, Kang implemented poetry and lyrical magical realism to tell the haunting tale of a quiet, young Korean housewife battling patriarchal violence and ecological destruction with the only means available to her: starvation.
In 2014, Han published Human Acts, about the 1980 massacre in the city of Gwangju, which crushed a pro-democracy movement. Her new novel, We Do Not Part, was born in the aftermath of completing that narrative. Its protagonist, Kyungha, is, like Han, a writer tormented by a recurring nightmare after publishing a book about a city called “G –.”
The novel begins: “A sparse snow is falling. I stood on flat land that edged up a low hill. Along the brow of this hill and down in 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 those gravestones?”
Tormented by this image, which haunts her living and dreaming, Kyungha reconnects with her former magazine colleague and close friend Inseon. Her friend is a photographer who has become a documentary film-maker, but has retreated to the island of Jeju to look after her elderly mother, who is suffering from dementia. Together, they dream of creating an evocation of that nightmare that will be a series of carved burnt logs leading to the sea. Kyungha discards the idea as a pipe dream, but Inseon takes up the challenge and secretly works collecting logs and forging them in her carpentry studio.
One night, Kyungha receives a text from Inseon to come immediately. She is in hospital in Seoul. Once they are together, Inseon tells Kyungha she has been secretly working on the installation.
While fashioning these logs, Inseon sawed off three of her fingertips. Surgeons have reattached them, though the treatment to keep them alive is gruesome. But Inseon has not called Kyungha to simply witness this horror. She is worried about her birds, Ami and Ama, who were left in her cabin in an isolated Jeju village.
She begs Kyungha to rescue them. But it is a brutal winter. A blizzard is drowning the region in blinding snow. So the novel becomes a quest as Kyungha battles the elements to reach Inseon’s home.
During this trek, Kyungha becomes delirious, suffering from hypothermia, trudging through snowbanks, determined to reach the house on the hill she has visited only once. When she reaches Inseon’s home, she encounters a vision of her friend, still in hospital, who recounts her family’s entanglement with the deadly massacre of Jeju Island. In the massacre, after a political protest, an estimated 30,000 people were killed by police officers, soldiers and anti-communist vigilantes. About a third of the victims were women, children or the elderly.
The author learned about the massacre when she was on a writing retreat on the island. During a walk to the post office one day, her landlady pointed to a cement wall near a hackberry tree at the centre of the village and said matter-of-factly, “This is where the people were shot and killed that winter.”
We Do Not Part is the poetic realisation of Han Kang’s own quest to understand her feverish dreams, “which she came to realise were about time and remembrance … In effect, everyone in Jeju is a survivor, a witness and a grieving family member.”
While I was often lost in Han’s endless descriptions of falling snowflakes, and the narrative is often stopped in its track for lengthy, repetitive, descriptive intervals, the novel is a powerful, often hallucinogenic, personal exploration of the fate of those crushed and murdered by authoritarian militarism. “Connecting dead memories and the living present, thereby not allowing anything to die off,” Han has said. “That’s not just about Korean history, I thought, it’s about all humanity.”
When one considers that two days before Han left for Sweden to receive her Nobel Prize, President Yoon Seok Yul declared martial law and sent armed troops into the National Assembly – something that hadn’t happened since the time of the Gwangju massacre – we understand the eerie resonance of the Nobel committee’s assertion that the author’s work “serves as a conduit for the memories of generations that suffered state violence”.
We Do Not Part is not for the faint-hearted. But it is a brilliant, original work about the epigenetics of generational suffering.
We Do Not Part, by Han Kang (Hamish Hamilton, $40 hb), is out now.
