We Do Not Part by Han Kang review – scarred with South Korea's trauma and terror

South Korean writer Han Kang has seen her star soar since The Vegetarian, her first novel to be translated into English, won the International Booker Prize in 2016 (the first Korean book to be nominated). Lauded by her peers – Max Porter called her “a writer of extraordinary humanity”, Eimear McBride “one of the greatest living writers” – last year she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Her latest novel We Do Not Part starts on a cold harsh December day. After months of a deep depression, during which she only sporadically ate or slept, Kyungha rouses herself and contends with a snowstorm to reach the remote forests of Korea’s Jeju Island. Her hospitalised friend Inseon has asked her to go there to feed Inseon’s beloved pet bird who will die without daily water.

Kyungha soon discovers, however, that she is house-sitting in a place filled with terrible memories of a family’s suffering. What she learns exposes an almost forgotten massacre in the island’s past and asks new questions about South Korea’s troubled history.  

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“Life was exceedingly vulnerable, I realised,” thinks Kyungha. And there is an implication throughout the novel that, at any time, something crucial to Kyungha’s survival or sanity might snap. But it is not only the lives that Kyungha contemplates in the novel which are vulnerable; there is an eerie atmosphere which also creates something like snow blindness in the reader.

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We might be in a dream, we cannot always be sure. Kyungha herself is given to vivid nightmares and psychological distortions. As she trundles through blizzards we seem to be in a world of wonder, fear and perpetual transformation. This gives the novel a particular frisson and keeps us on our toes.

Kang writes exquisite prose which reminds that she is also a poet. Her early description of “glimmering snowflakes studding the severed torsos like salt” – is typical of the kind of imagery and alliteration to be found on almost every page. But this lyricism does not distract from the horror of the violence and unimaginable cruelty Kyungha discovers in South Korea’s history, and this beautifully written book is scarred with trauma and terror. Kang makes clear that only by rousing old pains can important memories remain intact. The process might be agonising but it is also necessary.

We Do Not Part by Han Kang, translated by E Yaewon is out now (Penguin, £18.99). You can buy it from the Big Issue shop on bookshop.org, which helps to support Big Issue and independent bookshops.

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