Lead Review (We Do Not Part)

• Book: We Do Not Part
• Location: Jeju, Seoul
• Author: Han Kang

Review Author: tripfiction

3.75*

 

The author wrote The Vegetarian, which was the first Korean language novel to win the International Booker Prize (2016). She is also the recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature 2024 for her “intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life”.

The prose in We Do Not Part is indeed mesmerising and quite compelling in a subtle, yet excoriating way. This is the story of Kyungha, who visits her friend Inseon in hospital. Inseon has suffered a trauma to her hand. She will be bedridden for a while, as she has to undergo a procedure that happens every few minutes in order to preserve the nerves in her fingers. She requests that Kyungha flies over to Jeju to see if she can save her remaining caged bird, Ama, from imminent death. Given the unexpected stay in hospital, the bird will have insufficient food and water, and because birds are such fragile creatures, they easily keel over and die. Part of the tense trajectory of the novel early on is whether Kyungha will reach the bird in time.

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The pathos rises as she undertakes an epic journey and then fights her way through driving snow to Inseon’s place.

Whilst on Jeju, she happens discover photos of atrocities during the fight against the Communists, that have in some way marked all their lives, and this story is as much about saving a bird as it is about the ripple effect of traumatic events on subsequent generations. It is an exploration of what governments can do their people and that cruelty is part of the human psyche, balanced by more positive human attributes that ultimately (hopefully) win out.

There are dream sequences and nightmares, visions of parents and previous generations submitting to terrible death. A plan is forged by the two young women to work together on an installation, that somehow will be a monument. All the themes move around and interweave to create a legacy of the “Forgotten War”.

Miss Smilla’s Feeling For Snow must, surely, have been an inspiration at some level for the sumptuous descriptions of snow and flakes and the ice and the cold, perhaps a little overdone, but it is a reminder that people are at the mercy of the elements, as well as Realpolitik. A novel to ponder but it can drift a little – much like snow drifts – and at times the story hovers and then again finds its thrust.

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