It’s hard to write about the books that are most finely wrought. I finished Han Kang’s We Do Not Part a couple of weeks ago and I’ve been letting it sit with me because there are so many elements that all play off of one another. It’s hard to explain the craftsmanship of the book in a way that is both succinct and that does justice to Kang’s vision.
We Do Not Part is a novel that teeters on the edge of documentary and dream sequence. Some portions are narrated like investigative journalism, focused on fact and unravelling the threads of a messy history. Other portions read more like a dream sequence in which ghosts appear, the past and present are seemingly not in cooperation, and the impossible presents itself as a matter of course. At times, it felt reminiscent of The Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro, where we are perpetually waiting for a resolution that is not, and never was, forthcoming (silly us for thinking so). The way Kang navigates these different registers is impressive and makes the book feel satisfying in more ways than one.
The timeline of the book might be a barrier for people’s immersion in the text. The novel jumps around into different times in Kyungha’s life, developing in particular her friendship with her colleague Inseon. Kyungha seems to imply that their relationship is not close, and yet there’s an intimacy between them that runs deep and, quite honestly, is beautiful in its quiet tenderness. Inseon is a filmmaker, and Kang’s accounts of her films are so vivid that it’s hard to imagine that they don’t exist. Years earlier, Kyungha shared an idea for a film, based on a recurring dream, with Inseon. The two have long planned to create the film, but, as in life, there are perpetual excuses not to start the project. The project is simple: place a bunch of cut-down trees upright again in the earth during a heavy snowfall and film as the snow piles up. It is, as Kyungha realizes, perhaps too late, an image of death.
At the start of the book, for reasons largely unexplained, Kyungha feels compelled to draft her will. She writes draft upon draft only to rip them up and realize she does not have anyone close enough to whom the will should be addressed. In the midst of the process, Inseon sends her a message asking her to come see her immediately. It turns out she is in the hospital having severed her fingers in an accident with her workshop—it turns out that she injured herself because she decided it was time to start their project and was cutting logs. It feels prophetic and poetic that she loses her fingers. Kyungha visits her in the hospital, where Inseon has to have her severed digits poked with a needle every three minutes or so to ensure her nerves don’t die before they can reattach her fingers.
As I mentioned, the friendship between them comes across beautifully. There’s a surreality to it that I really appreciate—and even just in terms of writing style alone, I would put We Do Not Part nearly on par with the author’s award-winning The Vegetarian. During Kyungha’s visit, Inseon asks her to go care for her bird. It’s been a few days and she’s worried that her pet will have run out of water and will pass away if Kyungha doesn’t go immediately. So, Kyungha makes a reluctant trip to Inseon’s remote village.
This is where the dream-like quality of the book really shines through. In the transitional, (dare I say) liminal space, we seem to shift to a dreamlike unreality. There’s an extended section, for example, where Kyungha is waiting for a bus that does not come. There’s an elderly woman waiting for the bus that seems to know the score, but it’s taking forever. And the snow just keeps coming down. It’s the kind of static, directionless, scene that might present as a dream. When Kyungha eventually disembarks from the bus and tries to trace a path to Inseon’s remote workshop, she falls in the dried up river and awakes ready to move forward—it’s unclear how long she was unconscious in the snow; in fact, it’s unclear whether she survived the fall at all.
From there, Kang develops a motif of death and rebirth. As one might predict, Kyungha arrives too late to save the bird. She takes the time to dig away the snow near the tree she thinks would be suitable for the bird’s gravesite and buries the bird with a great deal of care—only for it to return to life the next day. Later, Inseon arrives unexpectedly—after Kyungha attempts to contact her in the hospital and eventually a nurse answers the phone only to tell her to call back later. From there, it’s a Beloved-like surreality where it’s not clear if Inseon is a ghost or a spirit or living, breathing Inseon—if she’s a figment of Kyungha’s imagination, she seems to know far more than Kyungha possibly could.
The motifs in the text cycle and overlap in an intricate pattern. There is much about birds—Kyungha traces the shadows of birds on Inseon’s wall and the palimpsestic approach feels significant to the overall project of We Do Not Part. The book is infused with poetry throughout, but one moment in particular stands out where Inseon has encouraged Kyungha to feed the birds and she gives them some dry noodles: “Each time the birds bit off a piece of the noddle with their beaks, I felt the faint impact on my fingertips, like the lead of a mechanical pencil as it breaks” (102). There’s a fragility to the birds—to life—that carries on throughout the text.
Another motif, of course, is snow. This is one of the coldest books I can think of and, if you’re reading this on the 25th of January, it is entirely appropriate. The documentary angle of the book is giving a family history that intersects with the Jeju uprising. I’m no expert; my understanding is that the United States was influencing Korean elections and the Workers’ Party organized a general strike. The resistance of the ‘communists’ (including women and children) was violently put down by the Americans. The inhabitants of Jeju were summarily executed and hidden in mines. One of the most powerful moments, I thought, was when Inseon’s aunt and mother were away from the village while everyone else was rounded up, taken to an elementary schoolyard, and killed. Inseon’s mother and aunt then had to then go through the bodies, wiping the snow off their faces to find their relatives. There’s a ghostly parallel with snow accumulating on Kyungha’s face when she falls into the dried river. There’s a double-ghostly parallel when Kyungha and Inseon go lay down in the snow as it falls and they stare up at the sky, confusing stars and snow. The book is full of these stunning moments.
The book delights in its ambiguity. For instance, the opening of the book reveals that Kyungha has written a book about a massacre in South Korea and feels afflicted with a post-traumatic kind of response. It sounds like it could be autobiographical if you’re familiar with Han Kang’s Human Acts. There’s enough in We Do Not Part to separate it from reality, though. As I mentioned, there’s also ambiguity whether Inseon is a ghost or not. At the end of the book, it becomes unclear whether Kyungha is dead, Inseon is dead, neither, or both. Even the title, We Do Not Part, is given some commentary: Kyungha wonders whether it means that they do not separate or whether they never get the opportunity to ‘part’ and say goodbye as they should. The motif of not being able to say a proper goodbye is critical, given the political context and the Jeju massacre.
We Do Not Part offers a rich account of both political and personal experiences. It’s a stylistic masterpiece where everything is so densely packed into just a few hundred pages. It’s the kind of book that when I read the closing lines I thought, “Well, darn, I’ll never write anything that good.” It’s the kind of book that warrants, probably, endless rereading and interpretation. It requires you to sit inside its pages and watch the snow accumulate. Unfortunately, for now, I must trudge on to new territory.
Happy reading!
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