kayinreads 's review for:

We Do Not Part by Han Kang

5.0

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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.