Dead souls

The Nobel laureate bears witness to Korea's traumatic past as one woman's quest is told through haunting, harrowing imagery

- Anne Enright

There are books in a writer's life that gather all their previous themes and explorations in a great act of creative culmination, which both surpass what had gone before and make it more clear. We Do Not Part is one of those books. Published last year in Swedish translation, it helped to secure Korean writer Han Kang the 2024 Nobel prize in Literature.

Those who know Han's work will recognise previous themes and methods here. Like the eponymous character in The Vegetarian, the narrator of We Do Not Part, Kyungha, is fragile and resilient. She finds it hard to sleep or eat, suffers from summer heat and winter cold, and endures terrible physical suffering for reasons that can be hard to understand. Both stories feature video artists, sisterly bonds, and nightmares of murder and bloodshed set in Korean woodlands.

There are structural similarities, too. The Vegetarian moves from one to another point of view around the central, finally starving, figure of Yeong-hye. In We Do Not Part, each section gives way to something that feels stylistically very different. Each new movement is a shift in consciousness as the novel moves relentlessly towards a terrible historical truth. In order to open her character to the facts, Han needs to break her first, pushing her through suffering into a new psychic space.