2.01k reviews for:

不做告别

Han Kang

4.09 AVERAGE

dark emotional reflective slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven: Character
Strong character development: Complicated
Loveable characters: Complicated
Diverse cast of characters: Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus: Complicated
dark emotional mysterious sad tense medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven: Character
Strong character development: Complicated
Loveable characters: Complicated
Diverse cast of characters: No
Flaws of characters a main focus: Complicated
dark emotional informative sad medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven: Character
Strong character development: N/A
Loveable characters: N/A
Diverse cast of characters: N/A
Flaws of characters a main focus: N/A
challenging dark emotional informative mysterious reflective sad tense medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven: Character
Strong character development: Complicated
Loveable characters: Complicated
Diverse cast of characters: Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus: Complicated
challenging dark informative sad tense slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven: Character
Strong character development: No
Flaws of characters a main focus: No

" [...] osservandolo ho la sensazione che quell'esistenza troncata si stia aprendo un varco nel mio petto a piccoli colpi di becco. Vuole scavarsi una tana nel mio cuore e rimanerci finché continuerà a battere."
dark reflective sad medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven: Plot
Strong character development: Complicated
Loveable characters: N/A
Diverse cast of characters: No
Flaws of characters a main focus: No

In lieu of an answer, I placed my hand over the photo of the bones.
Over people who no longer had eyes or tongues.
Over people whose organs and muscles had rotted away.
Over what was no longer human—no.
Over what remained human even now.


A trumpet of humanity, sounding a tune of questions: What is it to be human? What is the meaning of our brief stay in this world? How difficult is it for us to remain human, come what may?

Han Kang's new novel ponders these questions and begins with a dream, ending in a dreamlike manner, perhaps as Kyungha [the protagonist] makes her way through a landscape of truth, memories, and dreams, blurring the line between past, present, imagination, and reality—which sheds the layers of forgetting and exposes the bare bones of a painful Korean history.

It is a hymn to friendship, family, and the interconnectedness of every being that lives in the world—you, I, Kyungha, Inseon, Han Kang, victims of massacres across the world, those who caused the massacres, and those who killed them.

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 people 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.


I am profoundly moved by this novel. Kang's prose is so tender, but not the sort that shatters when touched—it's the sort of tenderness that shatters the one who touched. It is in this tenderness We do not part bloomed.

Like every book of Kang, she doesn't offer an easy resolution, instead she grips you in to the book and asks you questions—through the answers you form for her questions, you are able to piece together a possibility and imagine the resolution of the book.

How does one endure it?
Without a fire raging in one's chest,
Without a you to return to and embrace.


Overall, I truly enjoyed this book. It's a beautiful and haunting eulogy to the limitless bounds of imagination and the story of humanity that is passed on.

In fact, I am going to reread it again.
dark reflective slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven: Character
Strong character development: N/A
Loveable characters: No
Diverse cast of characters: No
Flaws of characters a main focus: Complicated

Stream of consciousness

"Life was exceedingly vulnerable, I realized. The flesh, organs, bones, breaths passing before my eyes all held within them the potential to snap, to cease - so easily, and all by a single decision."


I think I get the Han Kang hype now! This is a lush and dark book that refuses to offer any clear answers. That can be incredibly frustrating - especially in literary fiction - but I loved the feeling of being confused for the last 120 pages of this novel.

Quick checklist of things I loved in this book:
-The first 1/3rd of this book made me wince in a way that no book has ever before
-Kang could probably write 100 pages of just snow descriptions and I'd eat it up. I can't think of another book that so brilliantly writes about snow
-I was vaguely aware of the 4.3 Incident because of Lisa See's The Island of Sea Women, but Kang lays bare the brutality of that massacre in a way that I don't think See came close to capturing.