Kang turns the natural into something skeptical. Something as pure and welcomed as snow, can turn into a glue that melts deeper and deeper into our skin, like the memories of the past Kang’s narrator describes. We Do Not Part is quite literally a force of nature: hypnotic, mesmerizing, and aptly chilling

Nobel Prize winner Han Kang’s We Do Not Part opens with a writer’s repeated nightmares in Seoul four years after publishing her book on the massacre at G----, presumably the Gwangju Massacre at the heart of the Han Kang’s earlier Human Acts. Struggling with these nightmares, researcher-writer Kyungha also struggles futilely to write her will, starting over day after day.

Unexpectedly, she receives a brief message from the photographer with whom she had previously worked, entreating her to come at once. A former documentary filmmaker and now a woodworker, Inseon has been seriously injured and transferred from the island of Jeju to a hospital in Seoul. Requiring several weeks of constant treatment, Inseon begs Kyungha to travel immediately to Jeju to save the life of Inseon’s white budgie (parakeet) Ama, who won’t survive another day without food and water.

Facing a blizzard on Jeju and needing to travel by buses as well as hike through the dark to Inseon’s remote home, Kyungha faces mortal danger. While traveling, she recalls her work and friendship with Inseon, a former trip to Inseon’s home, and stories passed on to her from Inseon’s now deceased mother.

Thin on traditional plot, We Do Not Part is comprised primarily of nightmares, memories, and passed-down experiences of massacres that military regimes and local police have inflicted upon their fellow citizens.

Neither a happy nor enjoyable book, We Do Not Part is an important, unforgettable one sure to open most non-Korean readers’ eyes to political atrocities, none of which I had heard of despite some occurring during my lifetime. At times, readers may wonder whether characters, both human and avian, are flesh and blood or spirits, but such questions seem in keeping with the dreamed and historic nightmares permeating this story of inseparable, although perhaps fatal, friendship.

Thanks to NetGalley and Hogarth/Random House for an advance reader egalley of this attention-grabbing new work from Han Kang.

This mostly worked for me, and it really seems like Kang at the peak of her prowess. It’s a harsh yet surreal exploration of the brutality of Korean history, suspended between dream and reality, life and death. I wanted a little bit more meat to the relationship between Kyungha and Inseon, but it’s an unflinching and intimate exploration of state violence. The most obvious comparison is to Human Acts - the true historical basis; the frank depictions of violence - but there’s something of The Vegetarian in here with the surreality and even The White Book with the hazy, loose form. A novel that I think is more rewarding when read as part of an ouevre.

This is my first novel by Han Kang, the winner of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Kyungha, a writer suffering from migraines and abdominal spasms, receives a message from Inseon, a friend who left her career as photographer/film documentarian to become a woodworker. Inseon has been hospitalized because of an injury and asks Kyungha to travel to her house on Jeju Island to save her pet bird. A snowstorm impedes Kyungha’s travel, but her eventual arrival at her friend’s home brings her face to face with a dark, forgotten chapter in Korean history.

For me this was a challenging read both because of its style and its subject matter. The experimental style, often bordering on stream-of-consciousness, with its ambiguity I sometimes found confusing. The narrative switches frequently and suddenly between past and present and between perspectives so I struggled with orienting myself. Then there are sequences, especially in the second half of the novel, which blur the boundaries between dream and reality so it is difficult to determine what is real and what is imagined. Of course, this blurring is appropriate given that the content emphasizes the difficulties of penetrating a history kept hidden.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t comment on the beautiful, poetic prose with its vivid metaphors. The descriptions of snow are gorgeous: “white thread-like flakes draw empty paths through the air” and “snowflakes swirl wildly as if inside a giant popcorn machine” and “Snowflakes resembling a flock of tens of thousands of birds appear like a mirage” and “Each snowflake made its endlessly slow descent, seeming to thread together in mid-air like giant motifs in a lace curtain” and “a flurry of snow coruscating like fine grains of salt” and “the flakes were floating down like feathers now, and I could see their crystalline shapes” and “As the snow lands on the wet asphalt, each flake seems to falter for a moment. Then, like a trailing sentence at the close of a conversation, like the dying fall of a final cadence, like fingertips cautiously retreating before ever landing on a shoulder, the flakes sink into the slick blackness and are soon gone.”

Of course, the snow, like so much other imagery, is symbolic. Kyungha finds herself almost buried in snow, just as the past has been buried. Her struggle parallels the difficulty of re-visiting the past. The ferocity of the snowstorm mirrors the brutality of the events that occurred on Jeju Island. What cannot but strike the reader is the contrast between the beautiful language and the horrific content.

My lack of knowledge about Korean history was definitely a factor in my understanding of events being described. I might recommend that readers familiarize themselves with the events in South Korea between 1948 and 1954, but that would undoubtedly lessen the emotional impact of what is revealed. Nonetheless the reader must be prepared to read about torture, ethnic cleansing, and genocide so that, like Inseon, the reader might find that “nothing one human being did to another could ever shock. . . again.” I imagine that most readers will be motivated to do some research after finishing the novel.

The message of the book, as its title clearly suggests, is that we cannot and should not be separated from our pasts and each other. Trauma lingers long after the violence ends, even for generations, but healing can be found in remembrance and human connection.

This poignant and powerful novel demands much of readers. Not only is it challenging in terms of style, but it also asks readers to bear witness to traumatic events and to remember. It’s a book worth not just reading but re-reading because it’s so masterfully written that it is impossible for a reader to grasp all its artistry and nuances in one read.

Kyungha is a writer who has become haunted with nightmares after writing about a little known terrible Korean massacre. She has a friend, Inseon, woodworker and film maker, who she confided about her nightmare and idea to collaborate to bring her nightmare’s scene to film. Kyungha gets a call from Inseon, there’s been an accident and she’s in the hospital. When they meet at the hospital, Inseon pleads with Kyungha to go check on her pet bird. A serious snowstorm hits during her travel, and she barely makes it to Inseon’s home on Jeju Island. Once there, reality is a blur. Truth about Inseon’s hidden family tragedy (the Jeju uprising and subsequent massacre (truly genocide) of believed communists by South Korea’s army supported by the U.S. government) comes to light revealing a horrific hidden massacre decades earlier. This book is incredible. Descriptions of Inseon’s documentaries throughout make it feel kind of like mixed media. At every step, I wasn’t sure what was actually happening in real time. Memory, art, history, grief, and haunting nightmares meld together. The prose about generational trauma hit so hard and heartbreakingly so. A very dark but important read.

The bonds of shared friendship and horror meld together in this horrific and dreamlike novel mingled with images of stark white snow stained with red drops of blood. Kyungha’s friend Inseon has had an accident and was transported from her home on Jeju Island to a hospital in Seoul. But Inseon’s pet bird Ama needs to be taken care of so Kyungha travels by plane and bus to get to Inseon’s home on the island during a major snowstorm. Her real and dreamlike journey takes us down the road of friendship and remembrance as the book unspools the horror of thousands of lives cruelly extinguished and families destroyed during Korea’s history that had been long buried. This is a stark and visual read with the experience and condition of the landscape and environment during the snow storm harkening to the realities of what occurred in the late 1940s and 1950. I sometimes found moving back and forth between the real and dreamlike parts challenging, which probably was intentional. This is a book that definitely highlights a not-to-be-forgotten part of Korean history presented in a unique way by the author. Many thanks to the author, publisher, and NetGalley for the opportunity to read and review this book.

I read and loved Han Kang's The Vegetarian yesterday, but I couldn't get into the writing in this novel.

Dreamlike, unusual, powerful.

I loved, loved, loved the first half of this novel, which was so, so spooky and eerie and, like, somehow simultaneously deeply embodied and totally dreamlike. I loved the incredible scenes of Kyungha in the snow, Inseon in the hospital, Kyungha alternately having her dream and lying on the ground under the air conditioner and eating bean juk and wanting to die. It was totally immersive and I loved it.

And then... I didn't love the second half of the novel so much, just because it wasn't doing exactly the same things that I loved in the first half. But I can also tell that the second half of the novel is the entire reason the first half of the novel was written.

I would recommend this book; it's evocative and powerful and excellently written and I love Han Kang. But it's not really the kind of book that you can evaluate or judge the way you can ordinarily judge a commercial work of fiction. It's just doing something so personal and weird (which I do love).

[Indirect translation] obscures the specific challenges that arise in Korean-Swedish translations, and thus the joy of these two languages meeting.

Behind the walls of the publishing industry, countless decisions are made to bring our favorite novels to our shelves. These decisions grow ever greater when it comes to translations, and particularly translations into languages other than English. In the following essay, Linnea Gradin explores the complex process of bringing Korean literature to Sweden, featuring commentary from Swedish translators and publishers in her analysis of monumental author Han Kang’s latest release in translation: 작별하지 않는다/Jag tar inte farväl/We Do Not Part. Discussing indirect translation, questions of form, and even the choices made in translating a single word, Gradin presents both the burdens and blessings of such a unique language pair.

Han Kang, one of South Korea’s biggest international authors, broke into the English-speaking literary fiction space with a bang in 2016 when she won the International Booker Prize for The Vegetarian (originally published in 2007), a darkly insightful look at Korean society told through the story of a woman who one day decides to stop eating meat in a quiet act of resistance that turns increasingly obsessive. That same year, Human Acts (originally published in 2014)—a novel that delves into painful parts of the country’s past—was also published in English, further cementing Kang as a leading voice of Korean literature worldwide.

Born in the city of Gwangju (where Human Acts is set), Kang is from a family of writers: her father is a teacher and award-winning novelist, and her two brothers are writers too. Kang herself has been widely praised and won many prestigious awards both domestically and internationally, and is known for her ‘poetic’ yet spare and quiet style among Korean readers. In her work, she often comes back to themes of remembrance and Korean history, approaching the subjects in a deeply empathetic though notably neutral way, never telling the readers what to feel or think. After winning the Booker Prize, her work—particularly the English translations of The Vegetarian and Human Acts by Deborah Smith—found itself at the center of discussions about the complexities of translation.

With her latest book, We Do Not Part, scheduled for English-language publication in January 2025 (almost a year after it was published in several European countries), I again find myself reflecting on translation and publication practices—and how different stories are mediated across different parts of the world.


The first time I seriously considered the realities of translation, I was doing something I almost never do: reading a book translated into Swedish, my first language. At some point in my life I had started reading almost exclusively in English, and then made an unspoken rule to only read translated literature in English as well. I was living in England, where English translations are obviously much more prevalent than Swedish ones, and besides, I found Swedish translations of English choppy and stiff—maybe because I’m fluent enough in both to notice. As a result, I would only read a Swedish translation if the source language was another Scandinavian language (which I imagined would be a more natural fit), or on the rare occasion that the text wasn’t yet available in English. This was the case of Han Kang’s We Do Not Part.

All that said: a few years ago, I found myself capitalizing on a “Buy four, get one free” deal at my local bookstore and purchased the Swedish translations of Sun-mi Hwang’s The Hen Who Dreamed She Could Fly and Han Kang’s Human Acts. I told myself that the Korean originals were so far from both English and Swedish, linguistically speaking, that it wouldn’t matter which language the texts were translated into. And I was mostly right; I noticed no odd phrasing, and I particularly enjoyed Human Acts. But it was only later that I discovered that they were both re-translations of the English versions, and not direct translations of the Korean originals.

Discovering this phenomenon of “translation-hopping” (also known as indirect translation) firmly established my fascination with translated literature, not only as a reader, but also as someone who is fascinated by the politics of publishing. On the one hand, indirect translations can be used to fill a gap in the market, and—for practical or financial reasons—it is sometimes easier, especially for smaller languages like Swedish, to find English-to-Swedish translators than translators that work from another small language, like Korean. According to the Swedish publisher, when Kang’s English translations blew up in the United Kingdom, the Korean-to-Swedish translators would have needed eighteen months to complete the The Vegetarian, and a further few months for Human Acts—which, in the already slow world of publishing, would have set publication back two to three years—whereas an English-to-Swedish translation would ensure that Swedish readers could have access to Kang’s writing while the Booker win was still on everyone’s mind. In this way, re-translations can offer smaller-language markets a chance to keep up with trends, and help to contribute to a more diverse literary landscape.

But as a reader, you’re often not aware of these behind-the-scenes decisions, and when I discovered that the translations I had been reading were in fact not of the originals, it just felt wrong. This sense, almost of betrayal, was rooted in some subconscious hope that the texts I was reading were the same as those that readers of the original language would experience. But if the translator can’t even read the original, this idealized (albeit misconstrued) notion of what translation is drifts even further out of reach.

Of course, on a logical plane, most of us know that no translation will ever be an exact replica of the original, and even word-for-word translations will go through a process of transformation. But indirect translations turn the volume up a bit on these age-old questions: How much creative freedom is a translator allowed, and how can we best safeguard the intentions of the original text? Is it more important to convey the original text “word for word” and leave it to the reader to overcome any potential awkwardness? Or should translators focus more on capturing the essence and feeling of a text through words that are already familiar to their readers, even if it means deviating even further from the original?

Perhaps the answer lies somewhere in between, or there is no answer at all. But when you rely on indirect translation, it is hard to even enter the conversation. Just like each reader brings their own interpretation to the reading experience, so each translator brings theirs. With indirect translations, the original text will always be filtered through the English translator’s interpretation before it is filtered through the Swedish, and there’s no good way of knowing where they have strayed from the original and why. It will thus always echo both the strengths and the weaknesses of the English translation, and any awkwardness will be the result of English-to-Swedish difficulties, rather than Korean-to-Swedish. It could be that these types of “errors” are easier for Swedish readers to subconsciously correct than ones based on a language they are much less familiar with, but it obscures the specific challenges that arise in Korean-Swedish translations, and thus the joy of these two languages meeting.

This discussion is made even more poignant in the case of Han Kang, for whom the English translation of Human Acts by Deborah Smith has been both widely praised and criticized for its rather liberal approach to translation, which Smith has discussed in an essay for Asymptote. When The Vegetarian and Human Acts were then re-translated into Swedish based on the English versions, the creativity of Smith’s translations carried over. According to the Swedish publisher, it has been argued that the Swedish translations of both The Vegetarian and Human Acts are in some ways closer to Smith’s English translations than the Korean originals, in the sense that they, intentionally or not, mimic the uniqueness of Smith’s versions, rather than that of Han Kang’s.

What, then, of Kang’s most recent work in Swedish and English translation, We Do Not Part?

For anyone concerned about indirect translations, there is good news: since the release of Han Kang’s The White Book, Kang has been rendered into Swedish directly from Korean by translator duo Okkyoung Park and Anders Karlsson, which has given Swedish publishers the ability to make their own decisions on when and where to take creative liberties. However, this doesn’t necessarily guarantee “faithful” translation (what does that even mean?)—as with any language pair, translation between small languages offers unique challenges and semantic hurdles of its own.

As mentioned, I first read Han Kang in Swedish when I incidentally encountered the indirect translation of Human Acts. Based on real events, this harrowing story follows a wandering boy in the aftermath of the Gwangju uprising, a student protest in May 1980 that was violently suppressed by South Korea’s military regime. To this day, it is one of my all-time favorite novels for the way it deals with such a heavy topic with sensitivity, engaging with the tragedy without feeling gratuitous.

Years later, reading We Do Not Part first in Swedish and then in English via an early ARC—and now living in South Korea myself—I can’t help but see connections to her earlier work as Kang returns to similar themes. We Do Not Part follows the author Kyungha (Gyeongha in Swedish), who suffers from nightmares and migraines after writing a book about a massacre. In the sweltering Seoul summer, Kyungha experiences a physical and mental collapse, struggling with everyday life as dreams and visions torment her. Wasting away in isolation, she takes cold showers to escape the heat, and occasionally, walks to the restaurant across the street to eat 죽 (juk).

There doesn’t seem to be much keeping Kyungha tethered to this world. But, when she receives a phone call from a friend who’s been in a terrible accident, she agrees to fly to the southern isle of Jeju to care for the friend’s pet bird until she recovers. While on Jeju, Kyungha is reminded of her previous visits to the island: the stories her friend used to tell her about her family, and the island’s tragic but largely unacknowledged past.

In a mixture of dreams, memories, and flashbacks, the imagery shifts from gently falling snow to blizzards as the water washes away all evidence of harm. As both Kyungha and her friend convalesce in their own ways, the story of another bloody massacre gradually comes to light. Throughout it all, Kyungha eats 죽.

It is this word, 죽, that I keep returning to as I consider the peculiarities of translating between two small languages like Korean and Swedish. In the Swedish translation of We Do Not Part by Park and Karlsson, 죽 has been rendered as risgröt, or rice porridge: a translation which is correct, but doesn’t quite capture the nuance of the original word. The Korean 죽 is a light yet nurturing porridge—commonly made with rice, but sometimes made with other grains and legumes—and often eaten when sick. Making 죽 for someone is a sign of care, as years of interacting with Korean culture and people has taught me.

The much richer Swedish risgröt, on the other hand, is a hearty and festive food, boiled in milk and mainly eaten during the Christmas season. As far as I know, it holds no deeper meaning beyond signaling the arrival of the holidays, though the generalized gröt, or porridge, does hold some connotations of health and wellness.

By contrast, the English translators e. yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris have opted for an italicized transliteration of the original Korean word, ‘juk,’ perhaps partly in recognition of the cultural significance and some untranslatable quality that this small word holds.

Having lived in South Korea for a year and studied the language for many more, I am partial to the way that yaewon and Morris have approached this. It feels more faithful to the context of the story: a woman trying to heal her trauma, and a country trying to heal its collective wounds. Juk becomes emblematic of the process of recuperation that Kang serves the reader.

But I do have to ask myself whether this type of translation would have been possible in Swedish. Translation theory and preferences aside, though a Swedish transliteration system for Korean does exist, it is not as standardized nor as widely used as the English—even though the Swedish vowels ‘å’ and ‘ö’ are phonetically much closer to some Korean vowels than the strange configurations that English has to resort to. Furthermore, in an email, the Swedish translators noted that while words like ‘kimchi’ and ‘soju’ may have become viable in Swedish text, ‘juk’ has not yet reached this level of cultural saturation. They are also of the opinion that there’s no specific cultural significance to the word that the Swedish ‘risgröt’ doesn’t capture, and in either case, the context already makes it clear to readers why Kyungha can stomach eating it. Even so, yaewon and Morris are partial to transliteration here, as am I. Neither choice is more “right” than the other, as even the somewhat awkward ‘risgröt’ manages to provide the reader with a sense of comfort, but it does seem to be a choice informed at least partially by what amount of cultural literacy the translators expect of the reader; depending on the target audience, publishers and translators sometimes prefer to assume that readers are starting from absolute scratch, especially when the source language is considered particularly unfamiliar to the readership, as in the case of Swedish readers of Korean literature.

Instead of juk, Park and Karlsson spent considerably more energy on big picture issues like trying to untangle Kang’s use of tense throughout the novel and the passages that Kang has written in Jeju dialect—distinct enough for some to consider it its own language.

As Kyungha visits the island, the reader is transported back in time through flashbacks and memories to witness the gruesome repression of the Jeju uprising of 1948–49, during which 14,000–30,000 people are estimated to have been killed and some 40,000 displaced to Japan. After decades of censorship, the records of these events are limited; this history’s inaccessibility is reflected in Kang’s use of language, which many Korean readers struggle to understand, and the fragmented structure of the narrative.

Park and Karlsson tell me that they normally avoid translating dialects because it feels a bit inauthentic and contrived, but in this case they felt it played a big role in the narrative and decided to approach these passages through a sense of contrast: trying to capture the distinct and lovable Jeju-accent by giving these sections a more old-fashioned, colloquial, and softer feel, even though Kang uses it to recount atrocities. This produces a potent dissonance between form and content.

I must admit, however, that despite reading the novel both in Swedish and in English, I did not know that parts of the narrative were written in dialect until a friend informed me. That said, these sections landed like a gut-punch, so if we take the goal of a translation as conveying the same experience of a text from one readership to another, it seems to have been successful.

I believe this is because Kang has an astute ability to write about tragic events with respect and care, seen across her oeuvre and particularly in Human Acts and We Do Not Part, which shines through even in translation. Though the two books are loosely connected, We Do Not Part is quite distinct from its predecessor, with an erratic and sometimes hard-to-follow narrative where scenes nestle within scenes and readers are forced to stay alert as Kang switches tenses seemingly at random. Where Human Acts is bold and outraged, We Do Not Part has a much more somber tone that is at times hard to interpret, made all the more complicated by the structure of the text.

With such a fragmented narrative, Kang relies heavily on motifs to tie the threads of We Do Not Part together: snowflakes, birds, tidal waves, tree trunks, and, of course, juk. While the Jeju dialect at first seems to be a more load-bearing element of the novel, one that might affect the reading experience more than a single word, it is juk that feels like the beating heart of the story to me, as the narrative time spent eating juk is another way that Kang urges readers not to forget, word by word and spoon by spoon.

Where to draw the line between what to translate and what to leave “untranslated,” or when to depart from the original text, is a case-by-case judgment that every translator has to grapple with, and translators are in the best position to make an informed choice based on the context of the publishing landscape and their own understanding of both cultures. This small word, then, can tell us a lot about the difficulties of translating between languages, especially when the interaction between those two languages is so limited and translators bear the responsibility of introducing readers, sometimes for the first time, to an entire literary landscape, as is with Swedish and Korean. While I would gladly be momentarily confused by new and unfamiliar words—with the ability to look them up later and learn something new—publishers and translators often have different preferences in their translations, and it is often these details that might differ from one translation to another, rather than bigger structural issues, where the effect produced seems to be the main concern.

Juk besides, the quality of both the English and Swedish translations of We Do Not Part is rather encouraging for readers of Kang in all languages, indicating that no particular Germanic language is “better” than another for translating a language like Korean when the proper resources are put into it, and readers can rest easy knowing that the translators have chosen what they think will work best for their readership. Even so, just as each translator and each reader brings their own experiences to the text, so too does the language in which we read affect our experience.

Being able to read in more languages than my native tongue puts me in a position where I can choose translations that best suit my tastes, compare and contrast, and access texts that have not yet reached one market or another. In an ideal world we would not have to rely on indirect translations, but for readers who read in Swedish or English exclusively, translations are key to increasing access and cultural literacy, and any translation—perhaps even one that is indirect—might be better than none. Still, I can’t help but wonder what the result would have been if We Do Not Part had been translated into Swedish based on the English translation. Probably a completely viable translation, which, in a pinch, would have been better than no translation at all, but also one shaped by the choices of English translators for an English-speaking audience. In such a case, we might not even have the privilege of discussing details like juk or how to capture a dialect, because the choice would have already been made by the first translator. While no translation is ever perfect or complete, in that they can never be exactly what the original was, it is just those “untranslatable” qualities between languages and cultures that make translation exciting. With direct translations, Swedish readers get to fully join the conversation and experience the joy of exploring the unique meeting point between Korean and Swedish, from the larger questions of how to capture a dialect, to a warm bowl of juk.

Linnea Gradin is a freelance writer from Sweden, currently based in South Korea. She holds an MPhil in the Sociology of Marginality and Exclusion from the University of Cambridge and has always been interested in matters of representation, particularly in literature. She has also studied Publishing Studies at Lund University and as a writer and the editor of Reedsy’s freelancer blog, she has worked together with some of the industry’s top professionals to organize insightful webinars, develop resources to make publishing more accessible, and write about everything writing and publishing related, from how to become a proofreader, to avoiding ‘white room syndrome’, and what a novella is. Catch some of her book reviews here and here.

*****

An enigmatic atmospheric novel that likely will serve as the introduction for many to Kang's work. This moves in time and space (and through a blizzard) to make points that I suspect I missed as I was caught in the story and because I am less conversant in Korean politics than you might want to be to understand all of this. Kang doesn't focus as much on a linear plot as she does on language and philosophy. Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC. One I admired more than enjoyed.

Thanks very much to the publisher and NetGalley for the advance review copy of We Do Not Part. This is my first encounter with Han Kang's beautiful prose, but it certainly won't be the last. We Do Not Part is a quietly moving exploration of friendship, family bonds, and lingering trauma from a beyond-horrific event in South Korean history, the 1948 Jeju massacre. Highly recommend!

In We Do Not Part by Han Kang, the author again returns to a long-suppressed part of Korean history—the massacres in the late 1940’s of supposed communists and leftist sympathizers. The story unfolds through the eyes of two women as they attempt to get past their current day struggles to reconcile the past and what their families experienced.

There is stunningly beautiful, poetic writing here that both cocoons the reader inside of the story at times but also works to keep the reader at a distance at other times. It is a strange combination of immediacy and distance as dreams, reality, shadows and swirling snow disorient and play with time and place. Although the references to snow were so frequent, they almost became too much; it was such a good symbol for covering things up while providing a path, cold and suffering but with the ability to insulate, softness and beauty with harshness and silence.

Kang’s exploration of these dark historical periods, both in this novel and in “Human Acts,” is significant. It personalizes nearly unbearable situations, prompting us to reflect on past and present circumstances more directly. This novel is memorable and will reveal new insights with each reading.

Thank you to Random House /Hogarth and NetGalley for the digital ARC.

4.5 stars

Oh, where to begin with the majesty that is Han Kang. I can't string together a sentence that doesn't make me, a humble reader, feel dwarfed by her power over the written word - with all due credit to her amazing translator, of course. Thank you to Random House for entrusting this mesmerizing novel before publication in exchange for this review.

There isn't much I can say that hasn't been said about this treasure. Every word - every image - matters and helps slowly unwind the tragic past shared by these two women. The Jeju massacre was a dark, grisly moment in time that seems all but forgotten by too many Western students of history. I've encountered it only once before in fiction, in Lisa See's Island of the Sea Women. Though that telling is more straightforward, it doesn't pack anywhere near the emotional wallop. Han Kang is unlatched in her gift for use of imagery, so vividly rendered, to show (rather than simply tell) readers what she's trying to convey. It's a blissful reading experience, and I suspect this is a book I'll read every year and come away with something new.

I don't think I am the right audience for this particular novel. I was initially interested in it because I enjoyed Kang's previous novel, The Vegetarian, but I really struggled to connect with this book and story in a meaningful way.

This is likely a case of me being the wrong reader!

We Do Not Part is a poignant tribute to friendship, sisterhood, motherhood, and the cyclical connections between suffering and survival. The novel unfolds in three parts, narrating the journey of a young woman who travels to Jeju Island to rescue her friend's injured pet bird. However, her journey leads her to uncover the harrowing history of the Jeju 4.3 Massacre of 1948. Han Kang masterfully portrays forgotten tragedies—those that are often overlooked outside Korea—with lyrical and evocative prose. In this work, her writing transcends mere evocativeness to become hypnotic, drawing a seamless line between reality and dream in a narrative that could easily have lost its way, yet instead remains deeply poignant as it ties together all its themes.

By the end, the novel left a lasting emotional impact on me, one I can't recommend highly enough. I know I’ll return to this book again, drawn to its intricately layered, beautifully translated text in search of deeper meaning.

4.5/5 stars (rounded up). A powerful, at times repetitive, and often gut-wrenching read. I might even find this novel more moving than Human Acts, and both works would make excellent companion pieces. It’s no surprise that these books contributed to the author’s Nobel Prize.

A heartbreaking yet beautifully told tale. Interwoven stories and history collide. Despite the sensitive subject matter the writing is very palatable. This will haunt me for a long time.

I have almost nothing to say about this book. At a high level, it's about a writer whose friend, an artist, is in the hospital and asks her to go back to the artist's house to make sure her bird is fed, and then when the writer gets there she gets snowed in and we go off on this crazy dream-logic flight of fancy thing in which the first half of the book is mostly jettisoned and Han dives deep into the artist's family's personal history as it touches on atrocities committed by the military/police during the Bad Old Days of South Korean history. But the various parts of the book felt disconnected to me, or connected in some elevated symbolic/thematic level that I was just not plugged into, and as a narrative I found it quite unsatisfying.

The thing is, every time it snows, it comes back. I try not to think about it, but it keeps coming back.

The past is prologue in this book about the ways tragedy and trauma continue to haunt people—and how after effects of violence lives on through generations. The importance of shedding light on atrocities, but also the toll it can take. It took me a while to get into the rhythm of the writing, but by the second half of the book I found myself really affected by the grief infused in every page. This feels like a book I’ll keep thinking for a long time.

It’s been so hard for me to gather my thoughts about We Do Not Part to even attempt to put them into words. I would almost describe this book as a story within a story. There’s the framework setup of Inseon’s injury and Kyungha’s journey to Jeju, as well as the overarching theme of their friendship. And then there is the story that is revealed to Kyungha upon her arrival to Jeju, which is really the bulk of this novel.

I didn’t know much about the Jeju uprising prior to reading this novel, but I’m grateful for Kang’s signature searing prose for making me aware. I think this is a timely and necessary read. It was hard for me to ignore parallels between the story being told in this novel - mass extermination in the name of rooting out “rebels” or “resistors to the government” - and what is occurring today in Gaza. Especially considering US involvement in both. I do highly recommend checking content warnings before diving into this book.

It’s worth mentioning too that the framework story here is also still incredibly engaging and haunting in typical Kang fashion. I’m not sure that I fully know exactly what happens here, but I’m not sure I’m meant to. Overall, I will be thinking about this book for a long time to come.

Thank you to Random House and NetGalley for allowing me to read an advanced copy of Nobel Laureate Han Kang’s latest book We Do Not Part. I was both looking forward to and somewhat steeling myself to prepare to read Kang’s latest book. After reading The Vegetarian and Greek Lessons, I’ve come to realize that Kang’s books tend to dive deep into dark feelings, exploring emotions and issues below the surface. We Do Not Part goes even deeper and mines new territory. Where The Vegetarian and Greek Lessons both examined families, marriage, motherhood, and relationships, how society sets conventions and roles and what happens when people challenge or question them, We Do Not Part explores history and trauma as well as the artist’s role and pain in delving into the past. I also wasn’t sure what to expect based on the narrative—the story of a writer Kyungha who seeks to help her friend Inseon rescue her bird from the island of Jeju during a snowstorm sounded both heartwarming and different from Kang’s other books. However, when we first encounter Kyungha, who is the narrator of the novel, she seems utterly defeated, resigning herself to death. Like her other books, this aspect is bleak, and Kyungha is unable to handle many basic interactions or daily tasks. She describes the overwhelming heat in her apartment and is separated from her family. I got the sense that after working on her last project, Kyungha was seriously affected by it. The research and writing took a lot out of her, and eventually moved her away from her family. Kyungha is so resigned to death that she begins to get her affairs in order, leaving instructions for her body, and laying down to waste away. She exists in like a suspended kind of state, not willing to live, but also not taking action to die.
We also learn about Kyungha’s relationship with Inseon, who was a photographer she worked with as a young writer. They eventually worked together on other projects, and later planned to collaborate on an art project to memorialize a massacre. They planned to use logs painted black to represent the people who died. While Inseon wanted to go ahead with the project, Kyungha eventually backs out. At some point, Kyungha receives a text message from Inseon asking Kyungha to come to her with ID. We learn that Inseon was injured working on the project, and severed her fingers in the process, losing a lot of blood. Kang’s description of the procedure Inseon endures to restore her fingers is brutal. I found myself wincing, and the level of pain and discomfort I imagined was probably greater than anything I’ve read in a horror novel. However, I also got the sense that with Kang’s vivid and grotesque details, she’s possibly making a point about both the nature of art and also about the pain of memory, since Inseon was working on a project about a civilian massacre at the hands of soldiers in Jeju. Inseon’s other work, as a documentarian, also mines similar territory, interviewing survivors of the Vietnam War’s atrocities. Despite not speaking Vietnamese, Inseon seems to understand the pain and suffering these women have faced, and we also see how she suffered as a result.
Inseon then asks Kyungha to go to her home in Jeju to rescue her bird, Ama. However, Kyungha must go during an epic snowstorm on Jeju, and find her way to Inseon’s home, as a promise to her dear friend. Although the set up seems a little incredulous, Kang’s writing and the emotional connection between Inseon and Kyungha makes this quest for Kyungha more believable. Furthermore, it gives Kyungha some purpose in her seemingly bleak life. The journey to Jeju and through the storm comprises the first of three parts of the book. It is a harrowing journey to the home, and throughout the journey, Kyungha seems to plunge deeper into the white nothingness of the storm, moving further and further away from people. She encounters an elderly woman who seems to be unable to communicate and a bus driver who doesn’t seem to provide clear directions or understand Kyungha’s desire to travel to her friend’s home. Furthermore, not being from Jeju also puts Kyungha at a disadvantage, and she seems concerned that people will be able to tell she’s from the mainland due to her language and lack of familiarity with the cultural practices. The snow storm is blinding and painful. Kyungha’s eyes become sore. Snow gets into her shows and pants. Kyungha nearly dies due to the snow, but somehow manages to burry herself in the snow to emerge in the morning near Inseon’s home.
At Inseon’s home, Kyungha discovers more than the birds and also reminisces about Inseon’s mother, who apparently suffered from dementia, a disease that affects memory and the processing of reality. Kyungha’s journey to Inseon’s house also seems to have altered her perceptions, as she looks to find Ama, the bird. However, Kyungha discovers Inseon’s project and what kind of research she was conducting for her latest project. We also learn about Inseon’s personal connection to this massacre, as her father and mother both had personal connections to the massacre. I wasn’t familiar with this event and still need to learn more about it, but it sounds like it was suppressed from the public for many years, and Inseon’s research (and Kyungha’s reading/learning) is a way to unearth the injustice and violence, the death and destruction that happened. We can see how both women’s work, writing and documenting, lead to both physical and emotional trauma, yet, both women are willing to endure and persist, if not for themselves, then for others. Kyungha risks her life for a favor for her friend. Inseon endures a brutal treatment to regain the use of her fingers, so important for her work as a photographer and the woodworking that initially caused her injury.
The book’s title comes from the collaborative project that Kyungha abandoned but Inseon continued to work on. Interestingly, they both seem to have different interpretations of the project’s meaning, and whether it means that they are never separated, or whether they refuse to say goodbye. Their friendship proves that both are true, and that despite distances caused both by geography and the responsibilities of family and professional life, they maintained a kind of bond that is never really severed. Furthermore, even when Kyungha is on her quest to save Inseon’s bird, Inseon (and her research) guide her through the challenges of being alone in Jeju. One of the lines I highlighted kind of emphasizes some of the surreal qualities of this story: “Dreams are terrifying things. No—they’re humiliating. They reveal things about you that you weren’t aware”. In many ways, Kyungha’s journey is dreamlike. She travels into a blizzard losing a sense of sight and even her body’s feelings, unsure if she is alive or dead. Similarly, what she learns from Inseon’s project, the massacre at Jeju and the lack of closure that many of the Jeju survivors experienced, seems to awaken something in her. Her prior numbness abates and is replaced by a kind of anger and sadness. Like other Kang books, this is not an easy journey, but this kind of self-realization, especially on such an epic, historical scale, is never easy.
The other aspect of the book I wanted to mention was Kang’s use of birds. Inseon had two birds, but the other bird, Ami, died and only Ama is left. During her time at Inseon’s, Kyungha remembers first meeting the birds and experiencing them. She also shares how she learns that “Birds will pretend like nothing’s wrong, no matter how much pain they’re in. They instinctively endure and hide pain to avoid being targeted by predators”. The birds serve as meaningful symbols, and Kyungha’s attempts to rescue Ama both show a burial and a revival. Although the birds come out of their cage for Inseon, it takes time for Kyungha to bond with them, and readers can see how similar they are to the Jeju survivors, trying to just endure without questioning much about what happened to their loved ones, afraid of further repercussions. However, we learn that Inseon’s mother, who initially seemed childlike, was actually one of the citizens of Jeju who really pushed for action to find out more about her brother, who was likely murdered and dumped in a mine. Kang’s use of birds as symbols of both vulnerability and a kind of endurance and survival, masking their pain, was beautifully wrought. She uses birds in such a surreal way, I kept thinking that this book was kind of like Kafka’s writing—that there’s a kind of allegorical symbolism to it, and that she takes both beauty and degradation to explore the range of experiences and emotions. Furthermore, like Kafka, this isn’t an easy read, but it is a rewarding read. It’s haunting and powerful, and something I will need to revisit at another time.