![[K-LIT REVIEW] Han Kang offers ambitious, heartwarming story in 'We Do Not Part' 3 Cover of Han Kang's 'We Do Not Part' / Courtesy of Penguin Books](https://newsimg.koreatimes.co.kr/2025/02/02/2e00b08c-2b4b-4e98-accd-da19f9eb87b7.jpg)
Cowl of Han Kang’s „We Do Not Half“ / Courtesy of Penguin Books
Since Han Kang’s Nobel Prize win was introduced in October, dialogue of her and her work has been in every single place in Korea and internationally. Whereas she was nonetheless concerned in its day-to-day working, the bookshop she co-ran together with her son was swamped with followers, and plenty of curious new readers discovered themselves challenged by her lyrical and infrequently enigmatic writing.
Han’s earlier work to look in translation was „Greek Classes,“ a brief but difficult novella that generally strays into passages of summary poetry. „We Do Not Half“ is a for much longer novel compared and is Han’s most accessible work accessible in translation so far. That’s to not say that Han has sacrificed something to create a extra accessible work. „We Do Not Half“ can be her most shifting, formidable and intriguing novel in translation.
Kyungha, the novel’s protagonist, lives in Seoul and, like a lot of Han’s protagonists, has withdrawn from a lot of latest life. Haunted by a harrowing guide she wrote, she suffers from signs of melancholy and anxiousness. However when Kyungha’s shut good friend Inseon has an accident, she asks Kyungha to go to Jeju Island to feed her pet hen earlier than it dies. Sadly, it’s the useless of winter, and Korea is blanketed in snow. When Kyungha arrives on Jeju, there’s a big blizzard — Han makes use of this to conjure a chic imaginative and prescient of nature dwarfing and engulfing us and the issues we’ve constructed, someway terrifying and comforting on the identical time.
Han makes use of the straightforward premise of a journey throughout Korea to rescue a cherished pet hen to discover sure signature points: intense friendship, historic trauma and the fragility of life itself. Even the colour white is of significance to Han (considered one of her earlier novels is known as „The White Guide“), so aficionados of her earlier work will discover all types of conceptual continuity between „We Do Not Half“ and her different novels.
Kyungha and Inseon’s friendship is partly based mostly on their frequent pursuits. Each characters are storytellers serious about unearthing actual tales from Korea’s violent previous, tales that have been formally suppressed for a very long time and which many wished understandably to neglect. Kyungha’s guide handled a bloodbath in a Korean metropolis rendered within the textual content as „G___.“ This creates an intriguing parallel with Han herself, whose personal novel „Human Acts“ offers with the 1980 Gwangju Rebellion and subsequent bloodbath. In the meantime, Inseon is a documentary filmmaker: her movie handled violence perpetrated by South Korean troopers in the course of the Vietnam Conflict.
With state-sanctioned violence very a lot on each girls’s minds, returning to Jeju will entail confronting one other painful episode in fashionable Korean historical past: the Jeju Rebellion, a bloody chain of occasions within the late Forties during which the Korean authorities used mass violence to suppress a rebel on the island. Kyungha is already deeply delicate to historic trauma, and now she should face shut proximity to those brutal occasions.
![[K-LIT REVIEW] Han Kang offers ambitious, heartwarming story in 'We Do Not Part' 4 South Korean writer Han Kang reads on stage at The Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm, Sweden, Dec. 12, 2024, a few days after receiving her Nobel Prize in literature. AFP-Yonhap](https://newsimg.koreatimes.co.kr/2025/02/02/1537eeb4-0843-40e0-9f5d-62701156a006.jpg)
South Korean author Han Kang reads on stage at The Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm, Sweden, Dec. 12, 2024, just a few days after receiving her Nobel Prize in literature. AFP-Yonhap
Whereas Han’s different novels have lyrical passages typically rendered in italics, right here, the italicized textual content is reserved for Inseon’s tales, retold as Kyungha remembers them. It’s as if the acute whiteness of the blizzard blots out every part else, leaving Kyungha to give attention to the few issues that matter to her: saving the hen’s life, and her relationship to Inseon. Inseon’s narration progressively reveals that the Jeju Rebellion is of deep private significance to her and her household.
„We Do Not Half“ was printed in Korean in 2021, and e. yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris present the English translation. The novel shouldn’t be a straightforward learn; the descriptions of mass violence are brutal and unflinching, but Han is reflective in writing about this violence. The trendy-day descriptions of insomnia and migraines bear the mark of 1 who is aware of these signs too effectively.
Nevertheless, it is a comparatively accessible work by Han, and it’s, subsequently, a super start line for readers interested in her within the wake of her Nobel Prize win. Extra crucially, it’s a strong guide that’s greatest skilled reasonably than described. It deserves a collection of superlatives like highly effective, shifting, cathartic, thought-provoking and exquisitely written, however even these don’t convey the total expertise of taking the journey with Kyungha by way of the blizzard and into the center of tragedy and hope.
„We Do Not Half“ is accessible in paperback and hardcover by way of dbbooks.co.kr.
John A. Riley is a author and former college lecturer who spent over 10 years dwelling and dealing in Korea. He has written for The Asian Assessment of Books, The Chap, The Darkish Facet, Popmatters and quite a few different publications.