Beautifully written, this is a powerful story that takes the reader on an unsettling journey in a snowy village of Jeju Island, South Korea.

Kyungha-ya started to have violent nightmares in 2012 of killings and torture from the past. She had trouble sleeping. She suffered from migraine headaches and then stomach spasms. This caused major anxiety. She took painkillers and kept social affairs to a minimum.

Two years later, her book was published: a dark and dreaded massacre killing thousands. It was her hope that this would help with her dreaded health issues. She worked closely over 20 years with a photographer on assignments. Inseon was about the same age with a similar outlook of life. And then one afternoon, she received a confusing text message from her friend.

Inseon was in the hospital and needed her help. There wasn’t a lot of information given to her and she could only visualize the worse. And that’s when she started next on a trek in the freezing snow to Inseon’s village, unlike any other place.

While it seems like the story would center around the main character, Kyungha, it was almost all about the ancestors of Inseon from the mountainous village of Jeju. It’s filled with unimaginable reports that many of us have never heard of before from the days of a massacre in 1948 where the US Military was involved. It makes one immediately Google how 30,000 civilians were killed.

The author portrays the beauty of snow and at the same time, there is the excruciating harshness it can impose. And then there’s another part with the love of birds as pets and how they are cared for by owners. While it’s written well that brings attention to the past, it’s heartbreaking and not easy to read. This is a story that stays with you with distressing images.

My thanks to Random House and NetGalley for allowing me to read an advanced copy of this book with an expected release date of January 21, 2025.

Translated from the original language of 2024 Nobel prize winner in literature, Han Kang, this is a beautifully written, lyrical, symbolic, heartbreaking story. In modern times, there is the friendship of Kyungha and Inseon. There is also the historical telling of the massacre following the uprising on Jeju Island beginning in 1948. Following a scorched earth policy, at least 30,000 people were slaughtered on the island.

The beginning of the book was a bit difficult to negotiate with its dreamlike, surreal quality. But as the story of Inseon's research into the massacre and its effects on her family unfolded, it was riveting.
This is a tale of horror, resilience, intergenerational trauma and of never forgetting.

I have mixed feelings about this one. This was hard work for me, and I felt a half-step behind the whole way, like I was missing something. Whether it was Korean words or references that were unfamiliar, or just a different phraseology, I felt out of step. That in no way took away from the style of writing, which was lyrical and inventive. I wish I had more of an understanding about the historic events referenced (which I did do some outside research on while reading), maybe that would have cleared some things up for me.

All in all, this was an interesting read, but one I didn't totally connect with or appreciate more.

I received a complimentary copy of the novel from the publisher and NetGalley, and my review is being left freely.

Here is another one of Han Kang's books that inspires a passionate review and recommendation, but leaves me gripped with mournful introspection.

We Do Not Part is an ode to friendship, sisterhood, motherhood, and the circular remembrances that connect us to both suffering and survival. The book is divided into three parts, detailing (on the surface) the story of a troubled young woman who travels to Jeju Island to save her injured friend's beloved pet bird, and ends up unpacking the gruesome circumstances of the Jeju 4.3 Massacre of 1948. Han Kang is well-versed in recounting tragedies and massacres that are forgotten by history (at least outside Korea) in beautiful, poetic, evocative prose. Her writing goes beyond evocative to hypnotic in this work, with the veil between reality and dreams drawn back in an experimental narrative that could have become nonsensical quickly but ended up poignant as it tied together all the threads of the story. Ultimately, the story pierced through my heart, and I know this is one I would go beyond recommending to others. I know I will reread this someday and try to divine meaning through its superbly translated text again.

4.5/5 stars rounded up. A compelling read, repetitive at times, hard-hitting at times. I might like this better than Human Acts, and both can be read as companion novels. No wonder these novels resulted in a Nobel for the author.

Thanks to Netgalley and Random House Publishing Group for a copy of the ARC in exchange for an honest review! We Do Not Part is being published in the US on Jan 21, 2025.

Maybe Han Kang's best novel yet? It's hard to say because I've lived in Jeju for over 10 years, so this book really resonated with me personally. But this novel definitely has some of Kang's most lyrical, beautiful prose yet. It brings all the best aspects of her (previously translated into English) novels and combines them into one perfect concoction. That being said, this is a Han Kang novel after all, so be forewarned this book is crushingly sad (I seem to be on an extremely bleak run of reading lately).

One note about the translation I have is that there are a lot of romanizations of Korean words in this book that I don't think the average western reader will know what they mean; especially things like doshirak, ondol, maru. There are even Jeju dialect romanizations of the Korean word for mom and dad, which I imagine aren't really that apparent unless you already speak Korean (which I do). I kind of get it for some of the words where there isn't really a direct one-word English equivalent (the aforementioned maru and ondol for example), but I think they should have just broken down and added a short appendix at the back of the book if they were so attached to only translating things word for word. And again, this isn't a problem for me as I already know what all these words mean, but I'm just imagining recommending this to family members or friends and I know they would be pretty confused at times.

But this is just an uncorrected proof I'm reviewing, so maybe this will be revised or that appendix will be added. However, that doesn't generally seem to be the case in past experiences I have with this sort of thing.

If any element dominates Kang’s novel, it is air. Things born by air, birds, snow, ash, smoke, the illusion of flame rising were it not held down by some object, such as wood or a candle wick, “… the tangible sensation I had that the footnote I was reading … was emitting its own light.’ light and shadows cast like fishing nets from the flame tip on the candle across the walls and ceiling … ‘Inseon stands, her shadow soaring …”

Inseon, the documentary photographer and installation artist, lives with physical pain from her severed fingers and psychological pain from the memory and narratives of her past, the massacre of a village where her family lived. And died. You can look up the facts of the Jeju uprising online. From her hospital bed, Inseon summons her friend Kyungha to undertake for her a journey, one of many journeys in this book, a journey that turns out as rigorous as some story written by Jack London.

Before her call from Inseon, Kyungha was decompressing, having finished a book about a nameless Massacre of which she was possibly a survivor. Fallen in a state of not caring whether she lives, her existence becomes a slow spiraling toward the desire of suicide. From her austere dreams during that period, she envisioned a work of installation art in a forest and contacts Inseon to help her. Pain and sorrow, Massacres and art, bring these two women together in an unimaginable alliance.

South Korea has had its share of massacres, three of them appear in fiction, two of them, Jeju (1948) and the Gwangju uprising (1980), mentioned by Kang, the latter the subject of her Human Acts. The third, the No Gun Ri Massacre of Korean refugees by the United States military in the Korean War (1950).

I don’t speak or write Korean, but I do know how to read a literary text in English. The translation by the collaboration of E Yeawon and Paige Morris shows a novel presented in English with literary complexities and more symbolic chains than the partial elemental chain I mentioned above. I may not feel like I’m in South Korea, but thanks to Yeawon and Morris, my wits were engaged in reading another brilliant novel by Han Kang.

And thank you to Random House Publishing Group and NetGalley for an advanced readers copy.

Wow!
No wonder she won the Nobel.
First published in 2021. My thanks to Hogarth and NetGalley for an eARC. To be published in the US January 21, 2025. I started reading it days after my ARC request had been approved.
Looking Kang up on Wikipedia, I was surprised how little of her work has been translated and published in English.
Do yourself a favor and go read a bit online about the history of the Korean island of Jeju. Especially the "rebellion"/genocide that happened soon after WWII.
It is difficult for a writer to blend personal stories and history, especially when that history has political implications. Kang, with her ghosts and snow and precise, yet fulsom, prose, nails it!
The second part read much faster, once Kang reveals to the reader what tthe book will actually be about. Jeju. And families from there. Family, friendship, perseverance, and art.
The dream-like qualities of so many of the scenes just drew me in the further I read on into the book.
In the end there are no answers, and no conclusions - just as in real life.
Outstanding. Intense.
Looking forward to reading some of her other books that have been translated into English.
A Nobel well deserved - 5 out of 5.

This is an incredibly painful book. The dark feelings are pervasive throughout the story. While I did not enjoy reading it, I do recognize that it is so well written. Also I learned a lot about Korean History, relationships, nerve repair, generational trauma, true genocide, and more. I feel like only true literary aficionados would appreciate it. The author was awarded the Nobel Prize for another book. This one is even more visceral. Thank you NetGalley for the ARC.

No surprise that Han Kang has done it again, especially on the heels of her Nobel win.

WE DO NOT PART tells the story of a woman who travels to Jeju to help out a friend, and dives into the history of the island's massacre. In that sense, it shares more in common with HUMAN ACTS than it does with THE VEGETARIAN. But her powerful prose remains the same, sharp and heartbreaking. An insightful book.

I went into this blind. I saw "Han Kang" on NetGalley and immediately requested it, knowing nothing else. That may not have been a good plan! It was a difficult beginning, this book does not hold your hand or explain anything. On page one, you are plunged into a nightmare, with no immediate explanation. Gradually, you learn it is a nightmare, and the dreaming protagonist lives alone in Seoul. Man or woman? Old or middle-aged? Why are they living alone now, what happened to their family? None of it is explained at first. (She is a woman, middle-aged or older, I never learned what happened to her family or how she ended up living alone.)

Reading this is like listening to a story told by an elderly woman who goes off on one million tangents in the course of the story, so that you can hardly keep track of what the story was to begin with. It is not an easy book to read, it is not easy to keep going.

The writing is beautiful (and I think I cannot quote it here since I have an ARC - too bad, since it's the best part of this book), and it is beautifully translated by E. Yaewon & Paige Aniyah Morris, but the narrator, Kyungha, remains so detached from her story, and the story itself is so goddamned depressing, that I had a hard time staying engaged, a doubly hard time fighting my way through all the tangents. At one point Kyungha, alone at night in an unfamiliar woods, fights her way walking through thigh-high snow drifts, and that's how I felt fighting my way through the story.

It became apparent, eventually, that Kyunha’s story was merely a framing device for the <i>real</i> story, a factual retelling of atrocities committed by Korean soldiers on Korean citizens, on the island of Jeju and elsewhere in Korea. I had never heard about this part of history before, but I was very impatient at that point and not in the right frame of mind to really absorb the information.

As the story carries on into the snowy night, Kyungha perhaps loses sight of reality, or perhaps she has a feverish vision, or perhaps she is visited by a ghost. It's unclear what is real and what is not real. Kyungha herself is not sure, but she doesn't worry or seem to mind the confusion. It's up to each reader to decide what the ending means.

This will be a powerful reading experience for some. If you are a reader who appreciates slow meandering tales, and/or reading about past atrocities, and you like a touch of magical realism, you may find this to be deeply meaningful. But for me, it didn’t work. I expected this to be a story about Kyungha and Inseon, that's what I wanted, and everything else made me impatient because it got in the way of the story I expected.



A side note: Inseon's treatment after reattachment of her fingertips was gruesome and hard to read. I ended up googling to find out if doctors REALLY do this. The answer is: yeah, kinda. After surgery: the arm is raised, the room is kept warm to maintain good blood drainage, the fingers are regularly checked for color and swelling and compared to other fingers. External bleeding is maintained (I won't go into how, because ugh I'm sorry I read about it) for the first week, along with a saline drip, but pain medication is also given, so it's not QUITE as brutal as described in this novel.

I've been a huge fan of Han Kang's work for years, even before the Nobel Prize win, and was so excited to read this one. I think this is now my favorite of her novels along with HUMAN ACTS. In the summer 0f 2024, I had the pleasure of visiting the historic sites in Jeju-do dedicated to the massacres and genocide of the native people there, and this novel captures the trauma of it so vividly. It's 100% a must-read for me and I will be acquiring a physical copy.

WOW. This is emotional, complicated disquieting and profound. It represents
Itself as being simple but it’s decidedly not.
The profundity may become a permanent part of my lexicon, for which I am
grateful.
Having the privilege of reading this book, in its translation to English,
is something I will not forget.
My thanks to Random House PG via NetGalley, for the download
copy of this book for review purposes.

I read Han Kang’s The Vegetarian in 2017, just after it won the International Booker Prize. I remember it, still, as a challenging but compelling read. So I was pleased to have the opportunity to read an advance copy of Han Kang’s latest novel, We Do Not Part, due to be published in the United States in January 2025.

I found Han Kang’s new novel to be incredibly challenging - both in content and form - and I struggled to find my way. There is . . . a lot . . . to digest here. We Do Not Part deals with a supernatural quest/dream state friendship experience . . . which serves as a backdrop for the re-telling of a brutal genocide on the Korean island of Jeju in 1948. It is heart wrenching and horrific to read, and it left me feeling muddled.

The writing is lovely though. In fact, it was the writing that compelled me to continue on. However, in the end, I just couldn’t connect with the story.

Thank you to Random House Publishing Group and NetGalley for providing an advance copy of this book in exchange for my honest review. The book will be published on January 21, 2025.

3 stars.

I have not read the author before (now a Nobel Prize winner) so in many ways I went into this one with no expectations or preconceptions.

It’s a hard book to review - not because it’s not excellent, but because it does a lot in one novel. The reader is asked to both confront and relive the horrors of genocide and also go on a supernatural journey with two close friends. It’s a lot of ground to cover - the author does it well, and I mostly enjoyed the translation - but it does get a little relentless in places.

I think for the right reader in the right mood, this is a fantastic book. I certainly enjoyed it (as much as you can enjoy something like this), and I will be thinking about it for a while.

4.5 stars. Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC.

This book is difficult for me to review because my feelings are all over the place while reading this. The writing is amazing with sentences flowing into each other like tributaries streaming to the ocean. It is a sensory overload mixing the ferocity of a snowstorm with the horrors and brutalities of genocide, to the strength and resilience of friends, to an almost supernatural aura around the whole telling. You will be astonished by the depth of this novel. I totally understand why the author was recently awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Highly recommended.

Thanks to Random House for the ARC of the novel.

When I finished reading Han Kang's *We Do Not Part*, I had to sit back in my comfy chair and pause. What had I just read? Was it a ghost story? Do the main characters, Inseon and Kyungha, exist in the "real" world or have they moved on to some other plane of existence? Even now, I am finding it difficult to write about the novel not because I did not enjoy it--I did--but because I don't think I can convey exactly the emotions I felt upon finishing it.

I guess the difficulty for me lies in the contrast between beautiful writing on one hand and horrific content on the other. I had the same feeling when I read *The Story of a Brief Marriage* by Anuk Arudpragasam years ago. Just such a well-written novel to tell such a heart-breaking story.

And *We Do Not Part* is a heart-breaking story. There just is no other way to describe it. There is so much love in this novel, between family, between friends, pitted against so much human evil. There is a line in the novel where one of the characters comes to realize that "love was a terrible agony." *We Do Not Part* makes one realize to what extent that is true as the characters suffer unimaginable horror, and one can't help but come to the realization that the more one loves, the more one can suffer. *We Do Not Part* is a novel that will make you aware of the true weight of what you mean when you say "I love you" to someone in your life.

It is difficult to read novels that make you confront just how bad we humans can be towards one another. But in the end, these novels, like *We Do Not Part*, give one a little hope that love will eventually win out. One may--probably will--suffer agony because we love. There will be death, destruction, devastation. But somehow, if we can still love, we will be able to go on as Inseon and Kyungha do, seemingly overcoming time and space to be with one another.

A moving, haunting book.

Despite its award-winning status, We Do Not Part left me somewhat underwhelmed. While the novel explores intriguing themes of friendship, memory, and survival in a beautifully atmospheric setting, the slow pacing and disjointed narrative made it difficult for me to fully engage. The boundary between dream and reality, though meant to add depth, often felt confusing rather than compelling. Although the book brings to light an important, forgotten chapter of Korean history, the storytelling didn’t resonate with me as much as I had hoped.

How exciting is it that Han Kang is the first Asian woman to win a Nobel prize? Murakami is kicking the air, I just know it. But while I’m super happy a Korean woman won the Nobel prize, I’m not going to sugarcoat my review of this book.

First, the translation. Felt choppy and weird. I think a lot of hidden meaning went untranslated. But regardless of the translation, I still didn’t enjoy this book. I felt like Han lost sight of what she was trying to write. This was an ambitious book and I’m not sure Han was able to reach that goal.

By the end of this book, I had lost sight of the main character. Instead, I felt like I was reading a historical textbook. I also completely lost interest in the main character because she was so useless to the plot. The summary of this book mentioned friendship between women, but I didn’t see any of that. This book was just a dry retelling of a very horrific historical event that happened in Jeju.

Regardless, I’m super happy that Han received the 2024 Nobel prize and literature. I think it’s a huge accomplishment for Asian and female authors and I would never take away from that just because I didn’t like her book. I’ll probably be in the minority when it comes to my views on this book.

A powerful book centered around a friendship and traumatizing and devastating historical events in Korea. The writing is visceral, and there are tons of interesting imagery. As a reader, you have to put in the work with this novel, but the experience will reward you for doing so. Kang is a force.

SIDE NOTE: This review will have spoilers in it. I highly recommend reading the book first.

I usually don’t write super long, detailed reviews, but for this book, I feel like I have to. Han Kang continues to show her mastery of the craft with each book of hers I read, and this one was just as devastating as Human Acts without being the same book. She’s just… amazing.

We Do Not Part is a novel about healing, about trauma, about the horrors of war and the steps government will take to cover it up, about genocide, and about the mental toll of taking care of the dead and dying. I will try to cover these things to the best of my ability in this review, but if there is anything I missed, please, let me know.


My General Feelings

This book is a confrontation of the self for me. When I read it, each new page felt like a new awakening to horror upon horror. Each new page felt like a dead body that was demanding to be picked apart, to be dissected, to be known.

All I can say here is that Han Kang is a genius and truly an author of our era. She knows how to write these topics in a personal, poetic way, without bashing things over your head to make sure you get it. Instead, repetition feels like being forced to look at horrific things on, say, the news, and come to terms with it. Kang, if you’re reading this (I doubt it), know that you deserved that Nobel Prize, no matter what.

Like I said earlier, this book is a confrontation. This book forces you to look at yourself and the world around you, and on an even smaller scale, the people around you, and ask yourself, “How do we do this?” Every new anecdote, newspaper clipping, writing, is a new look at the world. It was eye-opening to say the least.

Another thing to note is the fact that a lot of the action takes place in part 2 of the book. In part one, it is more about Kyungha’s (our main character) journey to Inseon’s remote cabin. While there are deeper notes there I could touch on, in this review, I will be focusing more on part 2.

And as an extra note here, the translators did amazing. Even though they are different from her usual translator (Deborah Smith), they managed to capture the feeling of her prose that Smith captured in Kang’s previous works.


The Horrors of War and Genocide

”The soldiers were hurling bodies into the ocean, and people lay bloodied, their faces in the sand. At first I thought they were clothes floating on the water, but it turned out they were all people, dead people.”

It was horrific to read this book. It was even more horrific knowing this wasn’t just fiction.

Just like in Human Acts, Kang does what she does best: putting horrific violence and persecution into a personal lens. What she did in Human Acts and what she did here was not only tell the story of violence, but she told it through a person that we have a connection to.

Here, it was Inseon, our main character’s friend. The story of Jeju Island and the horrors done to it and its people is told through Inseon, whose mother was a survivor of these things. Inseon is trying to collect her mother’s legacy and carry it on, and hopefully find her dead uncle’s remains in the process. The genius of this choice is how it isn’t too personal to where we are drowning in the depression and grief of Inseon, but not too far removed to where we don’t care that much about the story.

What makes the horrors of war so prevalent and poignant here is that they already happened. We are looking at the lost stories of so many lives cut short, and we are looking at something that we can never change. These people are gone. The horrors done to them have been deliberately destroyed (more on that later), and we can’t help. For me, that was the most affecting part. I was reading page after page of horror after horror, and even more horrors that were untold, and they all happened so long ago that I am forced to sit and watch.

”Extermination was the goal. Exterminate what? The reds.”
“The governing US military ordered that everyone on the island, all roughly 300,000 people, be wiped out if that’s what it took to stop their communization…”

As for the genocide, I feel like it is the right word to describe what happened on Jeju. Even though the supposed goal was to “exterminate the reds”, on a deeper level, the goal was to get rid of the Jeju Islanders who were disagreeing with the government.

Now, I’m not sure if Kang agrees with me, but the language she used describing some of the scenes echoes descriptions of the Holocaust terminology: efficiency of killing, exterminating, and there’s a scene where a soldier uses extreme terms while talking to an inmate:

”We’ll slaughter every last one of you commie sons of bitches, wipe you clean off the face of the earth. We’ll stamp the life out of you if there’s even a drop of red in you.”

It all spoke to me as a pointing to the occurrence of genocide.


Covering Up

”And, as I’m sure you know, they estimate that at least a hundred thousand people died nationwide. I nod, even as I turn these words over in my mouth: They killed a lot more than that, didn’t they?”

A major theme of both Human Acts and We Do Not Part was that the government covered this all up. With We Do Not Part it was a major focus, due to the fact that we focus on Inseon and her mother’s journey to piece together where Inseon’s uncle went, and on that journey they face multiple obstacles, namely the fact that they cannot and probably will never be able to find the uncle’s bones because the government stopped excavating the mass graves and won’t excavate them any time soon (from what we’re told).

It’s implied, but not explicitly said, that the stopping of government excavations was the intentional want to cover up what happened on Jeju. And like I said, that’s a common theme: from trying to find paperwork to newspapers to photos, it’s a struggle to obtain them, because the government was blocking access.

And it hurts when you get the news that the government stopped excavating, because you can feel the weight and you can feel the feelings of the families there knowing that they may never find their loved ones ever again.

It hurts.


The Toll of Taking Care of the Dying

”The truth is, I wanted to die. It was my only thought for a long while.”

For the final category, I chose to do something that was only a brief mention in the final chapter of the book, but was very poignant for me. And that was Inseon discussing the difficulty of taking care of her dying, trauma ridden mother.

At the end of this book, there is a segment where Inseon describes in great detail what her life was like with her mother- and how difficult it was. I feel like this is a topic not very talked about here, due to the fact that we are supposed to take care of the dying and not complain, even when there is a severe mental toll. Of course, Inseon had a higher mental toll because her mother was screaming for help from her trauma, but that doesn’t erase the fact that taking care of the dying is an incredibly arduous task.


Quote Collection

There will be one from each chapter.


“I’m leaving you so I can breathe. I want to live, not be half-dead.”

“A child of thirteen clinging to her seventeen-year-old sister as if her sister wasn’t a child herself, hanging on by a sleeve, too scared to see but unable to look away.”

“I don’t understand it. She is neither kin nor acquaintance. She’s only a stranger I happened to stand beside at a bus stop. Why then do I feel in turmoil, as if I’ve just bid someone farewell?”

“I don’t know if this is what happens right before you die. Everything I have ever experienced is made crystalline. Nothing hurts anymore.”

“I didn’t care enough let alone love her to be feeling such grief.”

“As if the moment we touched, one of us might spread our death to the other.”


“Was there such a thing as wanting to see when all that remained of you was your shadow?”

“All to build their earthly paradise, but what kind of paradise is hell?”

“In every story, without exception, the woman looks back. She turns to stone on the spot… And for what? What has she kept turning back to see?”

“It’s the strangest thing, but more than the unspeakable torture I experienced… more than the years I spent locked up without cause, it’s that woman’s voice that still haunts me.”

“How much further into these depths can we go? Is this the silence that lies below the ocean in my dream?”

“...and still to this day there are bones upon bones that remain buried. Those children. Children killed in the name of extermination.”