Take a photo of a barcode or cover
A review by sisa_moyo
We Do Not Part by Han Kang
I thoroughly enjoyed this, even though I feel like maybe some of the symbolism went over my head. Han Kang, through memories and nightmares, takes us the gruesome events of mass violence and atrocities against defenseless unarmed people on Jeju Island in the late 1940s-50s.
As always, like with Human Acts, these atrocities are explored not from the confrontations and the clashes and fighting - but in the humans, the survivors, those left behind, the mass graves then and now. Through dreams, nightmares, memories, and oral accounts Kang brings to bare a dark, tumultuous time in Korea. It's a practice and a call to remember, to not let the details, the bones history, the memories be washed away with the passing of time. She is able to be so gentle and humane with violent histories, and with memory and trauma. This alongside the way she explores and dwells in a season and the effect on the person, the subject matter. The winter, the wind, the snow blanketing everything.
I remember thinking that all of her previous works were so vastly different in subject matter and voice that it almost felt like 4 different authors produced them. But this book puts a literary connection in my mind between all those works in various ways - takes her voice from each and blends it with lyrical prose and a nation’s reckoning and produces this masterpiece.
I think if you enjoyed Human Acts of course, and Greek Lessons and oddly Bae Suah's Untold Night and Day, in how it explores and traverses the opposing season - summer, and in the feverish, hallucinations of seeing what's maybe not there) you will enjoy this one.
As always, like with Human Acts, these atrocities are explored not from the confrontations and the clashes and fighting - but in the humans, the survivors, those left behind, the mass graves then and now. Through dreams, nightmares, memories, and oral accounts Kang brings to bare a dark, tumultuous time in Korea. It's a practice and a call to remember, to not let the details, the bones history, the memories be washed away with the passing of time. She is able to be so gentle and humane with violent histories, and with memory and trauma. This alongside the way she explores and dwells in a season and the effect on the person, the subject matter. The winter, the wind, the snow blanketing everything.
I remember thinking that all of her previous works were so vastly different in subject matter and voice that it almost felt like 4 different authors produced them. But this book puts a literary connection in my mind between all those works in various ways - takes her voice from each and blends it with lyrical prose and a nation’s reckoning and produces this masterpiece.
I think if you enjoyed Human Acts of course, and Greek Lessons and oddly Bae Suah's Untold Night and Day, in how it explores and traverses the opposing season - summer, and in the feverish, hallucinations of seeing what's maybe not there) you will enjoy this one.