“Sometimes, with some dreams, you awake and sense that the dream is ongoing elsewhere.”
‘We Do Not Part’ begins with a dream. A dream where the narrator is stumbling through a treacherous snow-covered landscape with stumps of trees as tall as humans. She has been having this recurrent nightmare ever since she published her last book, the research of which took too much out of her. Estranged from her family, with her mental health threatening to consume her everyday, eating barely enough to survive, the narrator is not sure she wants to continue living. She is wrenched from this nightmare when her friend who’s had a gruesome accident calls her to the hospital and tasks her with travelling to the island where she lives to take care of her bird who will otherwise die of starvation. The narrator is taken aback because she never thought she was the first person her friend would call upon, and against her better senses, she proceeds to catch a flight and fly into a ferocious snowstorm to attempt to save a bird which may or may not still be alive. Once she reaches her friend’s house after a harrowing journey, she stumbles upon the research that her friend had been doing about the Jeju massacre.
“We Do Not Part” was published in Korean in 2021 and translated into French two years later. It is the first book to be published in English after Han Kang won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2025. The book was much anticipated, and despite the hype, it does not disappoint. It is an extremely ambitious work, which talks of the Jeju massacre where close to 30,000 people were killed in mass exterminations on the suspicion of being communist sympathisers or of harbouring communist sympathisers in their family. This is not a tragedy that people even want to acknowledge because too many people were complicit. The book is meticulously researched, and while discussing the details of the tragedy, the tone is almost academic. However, the story of the massacre is closely linked to the fate of individuals, which gives the account an urgency that it might have otherwise lacked. Human psychology is such that we do not relate to large numbers the way we do to individual stories- 30,000 killed doesn’t hit us as hard as the fate of the specific people linked to the tragedy.
Throughout the book, Han Kang uses the personal to draw attention to the larger tragedy. While the narrator battles the treacherous snowstorm to reach her friend’s home, it is also metaphorical. The narrator is also fighting her own mental health issues, which while insignificant in the larger scheme of things is of prime importance to her.
Snow, in its many forms, is a recurrent motif throughout the book. A perfectly formed snowflake that falls on her jacket, running out of a heated room to catch the first snowfall, the blanket of snow which smothers the entire landscape yet also throws it into relief. Snow is used to link the past and the present-
“A thought comes to me. Doesn’t water circulate endlessly and never disappear? If that’s true, then the snowflakes Inseon grew up seeing could be the same ones falling on my face at this moment. I am reminded of the Inseon’s mother described, the ones in the schoolyard,[…] Who’s to say the snow dusting my hands now isn’t the same snow that had gathered on their faces.”
At the core of the book is the art installation that the narrator wanted to collaborate with her friend on- the installation which first revealed itself to her in a dream, but which actually lies at the heart of her friend’s obsessive research into her family history! The book does not directly describe the events of the Jeju massacre but tells the story of the quest of the families of the victims to know what happened. In many ways, this indirect storytelling conveys the horror much more powerfully than a direct narrative might have.
Like her other works, this book by Han Kang also draws you deep inside yourself and forces you to confront issues that you may not want to acknowledge. It is a highly unsettling book, which is where the power of the book really lies.
“Snow falls. On my forehead and cheeks. On my upper lip, the groove above it. It is not cold. It is only as heavy as feathers, as the finest tip of a paintbrush. Has my skin frozen over? Is my face covered in snow as it would be if I were dead? But my eyelids must not have grown cold. Only the snowflakes clinging to them are. They melt into cold droplets of water and seep into my eyes.”
[I received a review copy from Penguin India. The views are my own.]
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