By Flynn Benson
FICTION
We Do Not Part
Han Kang
Hamish Hamilton, $35
When the South Korean writer Han Kang won the Nobel Prize last year, celebrations broke out across the country. Some of the celebration must surely have taken place in the offices of the cultural bureaucracy, where the Swedish Academy’s announcement represented the culmination of a decades-long government project to win the world’s premier literary prize.
Having already succeeded in the global cultural sweepstakes of music (Gangnam Style), film (Parasite) and television (Squid Game), South Korea was now the fourth Asian country to join the pantheon of literature in Stockholm. The world is now looking at South Korea; in We Do Not Part, Han’s 2021 novel newly translated into English, the Nobel laureate is looking squarely at the nation’s past.
The narrative begins, as in Han’s most well-known novel, The Vegetarian, with a dream: a woman walks through a forest that gives “the impression of a hundred men, women and haggard children huddling in the snow”. Soon she senses she is in a kind of graveyard by the sea. The tide is coming in, and she tries to do what she can to preserve those buried. Our narrator, Kyungha, is the dreamer; in her waking life, she is a writer equally driven by a desire to rescue something of the past and help the innocent, no matter how futile it may be.
Adrift and listless in the capital, she visits her friend Inseon, a documentary filmmaker, at a Seoul hospital. Inseon has injured herself in her studio and asks Kyungha to travel to Jeju Island for her pet bird, who has been locked away for days without food or water. What starts as a quixotic favour for a friend shifts into the realm of parable, as the narrator finds herself battling a snowstorm while she tries to find the small white creature.
Nobel laureate Han Kang.Credit: Getty Images
The blank, frozen landscape serves as a canvas for Han, a space where history becomes as vivid as the present. The narrative quickly slips away from realism to a literary form that incorporates both historical testimony and surreal devices: characters talk of whole villages burnt to the ground; ghosts appear by candlelight; remains are unearthed beneath airports; family members are taken in by authorities and never seen again; conversations are held across different decades. The past lies perfectly preserved beneath the snow.
The central event of the historical violence, the author eventually makes clear, was the 1948-49 Jeju Uprising, in which large parts of the island’s population sought to protest against the partition of Korea, and oppose American influence on the nation’s politics. The rebellion was brutally suppressed, and those killed were painted for decades after as communist forces, as reds to be “exterminated”. These political and historical explanations only surface late in the novel, long after accounts of the brutalities and cruelties involved have rendered them senseless.
Writing at such a lofty altitude runs the risk of leaving all but the most sincere readers behind. But even as Han’s writing generally forgoes humour and irony, it presents such fervent idealism, such unequivocal belief in literature as a humanitarian project, that it inspires admiration – not least in our age of ever more meaningless images and monetised distraction. The same fierce principles are to be found in Han’s public persona: when called to give a press conference for her Nobel Prize, she declined, saying that she could not celebrate at a time when wars were raging and innocents were suffering.
Sadly, the writer’s moral clarity and fervency are let down by her translation into English. We Do Not Part was not translated by Deborah Smith, as in all Han’s previous works in English, but by a Korean and an American, e. yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris. The prose here trades the sometimes controversial fluency of Smith’s prose for an apparent fidelity to the original Korean, resulting in a style that is frequently disjointed and clumsy.
Some sentences feature bizarre choices of vocabulary and syntax, detracting from the significant emotional weight of the narrative (“Her eyes glistened with soundless tears, as if all the warm affection she’d stored for me over the last twenty years was seeping out at once”), while metaphors leave readers wondering how the original sounded (“The tight bulb of rice-coloured petals was dusted with snow that glimmered like sugar granules in the light”).
Very little has changed by the close of We Do Not Part, but the novel ends on an image of hope, envisioning it as a delicate, living thing. In a world where the morals and ideals of a writer from Seoul can see her feted the world over, it could almost be convincing.
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