Tlisted here are books in a author’s life that collect all their earlier themes and explorations in an important act of inventive end result, which each surpasses what had gone earlier than and makes it extra clear. We Do Not Half is a type of books. Printed final 12 months in Swedish translation, it helped to safe Korean author Han Kang the 2024 Nobel prize in literature.
Those that know Han’s work will recognise earlier themes and strategies right here. Just like the eponymous character in The Vegetarian, the narrator of We Do Not Half, Kyungha, is fragile and resilient. She finds it arduous to sleep or eat, suffers from summer season warmth and winter chilly, and endures horrible bodily struggling for causes that may be arduous to know. Each tales characteristic video artists, sisterly bonds, and nightmares of homicide and bloodshed set in Korean woodlands.
There are structural similarities, too. The Vegetarian (whose three distinct sections had been initially printed individually) strikes from one to a different perspective across the central, lastly ravenous, determine of Yeong-hye. In We Do Not Half, every part provides option to one thing that feels stylistically very totally different, although there is just one narrator and the motion takes place over the course of some days. Every new motion is a shift in consciousness because the novel strikes, not round some central thriller (why will Yeong-hye not eat?), however relentlessly in the direction of a horrible historic fact. With a view to open her character to the info, Han wants to interrupt her first, pushing her by way of struggling and problem into a brand new psychic area.
After a small, searing accident, Kyungha’s good friend Inseon asks her to journey to her dwelling on Jeju Island to save lots of her pet hen Ama from hunger. Kyungha, who lives a lonely life, instantly undertakes this tiny, sacred mission. She travels by way of a snowstorm, as the ability grid fails and the transport system shuts down, her thoughts all the time on the flickering fringe of a migraine. So excessive is the journey that, as she arrives at Inseon’s home, she appears to cross into a special actuality, a world of shadows and of ghosts so actual that Kyungha doesn’t know if she herself is alive or struggling “the illusions of a lifeless soul”.
The info which might be so unsparingly uncovered on this shamanistic area concern the aftermath of the 1948 rebellion on Jeju Island when 30,000 civilians had been killed by anti-communist troops through the seek for what Han describes as “100 guerrillas within the hills”. This was adopted, she writes, by the homicide of “2 hundred thousand folks” on the mainland the subsequent summer season, in a sequence of “exterminations” within the lead-up to the Korean warfare. The our bodies of the slain had been washed out to sea, hidden in a cobalt mine, or they continue to be curled in pits underneath the fashionable runway of the island airport. Those that sought the bones of their lifeless had been severely punished. In its insistence on talking of this stuff, We Do Not Half resembles Human Acts, Han’s third e-book to seem in English translation, which instructed of the Could 1980 bloodbath in Gwangju, when scholar protests had been suppressed throughout a interval of martial regulation. In each books, atrocity yields, on the web page, to photographs of the human soul as hen and shadow.
Few writers are so unremitting with reference to ache, which is, for Han, the reality of our mortality. Her impulse is compassionate, however it’s certain to a priority with magnificence and coldness. Like The White Guide, which opens with the tragic dying of a new child, We Do Not Half enters a whiteout and it layers many pictures of blankness, as if to rehearse the coolness and nonexistence of dying itself.
If this sounds daunting, it reads splendidly properly. The primary two actions of the e-book are a masterclass of poetic management. We’re given some info about Kyungha’s good friend, Inseon; their work collectively, the accident in her workshop, the journey to the hospital. Solely as you learn deeper into the e-book do you realise how rigorously positioned these particulars had been, how every will develop into freighted with that means, till their thematic promise is sort of unbearably fulfilled. Nothing is wasted or left undone. Every picture settles calmly, however the cumulative weight makes it arduous to breathe.
“I stroll, feeling an odd compulsion to match my steps to the tempo of the drifting snow, which itself appears synchronised to the passage of time.” The passages about snow work by repetition, variation and sluggish accumulation: harmful tips that in different palms may lapse into the meaningless or the banal. Right here they’re relentlessly lovely, more and more horrible, and all the time easy. It’s a aid to know that the sluggish fall of this part won’t final for ever. “If the space between the clouds and the bottom had been infinite,” she writes, “the snowflakes too would develop to infinity, however in actuality the descent by no means takes longer than an hour.”
Kyungha describes how areas throughout the snow crystal take in and entice sound, how by reflecting gentle in myriad instructions “it seems colourless, it seems white”. Han’s palette is completely managed. We see white snow, white waves, white thread, a floor crosshatched by the ink strokes of handwriting and by bushes stained with “gradations of black”. Clothes is “the color of rice”, 15 years with out daylight leaves a person “pale as a mushroom”, night time is “a sea of ink”, gentle is blue-grey, pewter and ashen. This discipline of muted color is slashed by a surprising sequence of reds: the blood of Inseon’s relations frozen on the bottom, the glowing slits in a wooden range, purple silk wrapped round bins of information, the earth of a ransacked village stained with burst pots of gochujang sauce. When Kyungha lastly asks what the troopers wanted “to exterminate”, the reply comes as political color: “The reds.”
We Do Not Half is each act of witness and a phenomenal poetic object. There are repeated pictures of birds, candle flame, bushes. Whilst household relationships develop into tangled or undone, the novel is certain collectively by a secret internet of strains, of nerves “like silk” and cotton threads, and this lacework expresses the theme of connection within the title. At one level in her journey, Kyungha encounters a blank-eyed older lady, and their separation leaves an emotional mark: “She is neither kin nor acquaintance. She’s solely a stranger I occurred to face beside at a bus cease. Why then do I really feel in turmoil, as if I’ve simply bid somebody farewell?”
after e-newsletter promotion
The burden of a life may be contained in a single gentle gesture. Although folks go away, their presences stay, and these ghosts are in all places. Bushes have fronds “like sleeves”. The massacred crowd turns into a forest of blackened trunks which might be additionally seen as “pillars of ash”. They’ve “our bodies spun from wind”, that pierce Inseon like 1000’s of needles, producing a “profound, uncanny euphoria”: grief working near transcendence as pleasure is to ache.
Within the newspaper clippings and analysis information she finds within the Jeju home, Kyungha senses “one thing oozing from the web page”. Blood runs “beneath the numbers” of the lifeless. A presence “just like the faintest of voices” emanates from the textual content. This final made the hair get up on the again of my neck: I assumed for a second that the e-book in my hand was haunted. It’s a uncommon privilege to learn a masterpiece so just lately crafted, to know that the brand new prose you’re studying (too quick!) will endure. We Do Not Half is an astonishing e-book.
We Do Not Half by Han Kang, translated by e yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris, is printed by Hamish Hamilton (£18.99) To assist the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Supply fees could apply.
Supply hyperlink