This book is about the cost of past sins; in this case the sins are national atrocities committed by South Korean authorities on its own citizens, but the costs and burdens are examined at the individual level. But it's also the story of a life-long friendship between 2 women that even, apparently, survives death. And it is beautifully told. The descriptions of the world are exquisite - the author's eye for detail is amazing - yet the tone of the book is slightly uncanny or hallucinogenic, especially in the final section.

This is a beautiful book, and it's easy to see why Han Kang won a Nobel Prize.

I'm grateful to Hogarth Books, NetGalley , and Random House Group for the eARC.

This is the second book I've read by Han Kang, after The Vegetarian. I wasn't aware until after I had read it, that it was a part of a trilogy, albeit standalone. In We do not part, Han Kang takes a dreadful incident in Korean history and weaves it into an imagery of poetic prose.
The story is told in many forms. It is narrated between two friends with flashbacks as interlude in between and at times like a documentary.

Subtle story telling has been interposed with vivid imagery and metaphors that can be imagined as two or more separate characters and incidents occurring simultaneously. Lines are omitted between human existence and spiritual, and you can never find out the difference. The book give the feelings of a devastatingly beautiful war poem, where the reader feels they are in the war, and times , a mere spectator.

The translated is brilliant, lucid and flows. It's a heavy, but required read, and says a lot in a short volume.

This book is beautiful and heartbreaking. It examines the generational trauma and grief of war and the atrocities that humans are capable of committing. The writing itself is poetic even while dealing with the gruesome subject matter. The descriptions of the Jeju Island massacre were heartbreaking. The heart of the story is the deep friendship between two women, Inseon and Kyungha.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for a free eARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Absolutely gut-wrenching. Beautiful. Han Kang did not disappoint with this one. This novel is in the same vein as Kang's novel Human Acts, this time about the Jeju Massacre instead of the Gwangju Uprising. The way Han Kang handles these tragic events in Korean history is unlike any other. She really demonstrates how much he deserved the Novel Prize with this one.

I haven't read Han Kang's other books, especially the Vegetarian, so I may have to go back and read them. We Do Not Part is beautifully written, and I am reading the English translation, but it's definitely not a straightforward plot. I visited Jeju Island last year and did a lot of historical reading, but if I hadn't, I would have had a hard time following it, and I'm still not sure I got all the symbolism.. Some of the story is told in dreams and visions, so you don't always know what is real or not. And it was very interesting, but the author makes you work for it.

We Do Not Part
By Han Kang

This is a strange book. Or maybe I just don't understand the cultural differences. But I found it very hard to follow. I really am not sure what the author is saying here.

On the plus side, the writing itself is well done. The story line, however, did not resonate with me. The two friends, the birds, the storm, the atrocities of war, both in Korea in the past and also in Viet Nam – all of these subjects merit thought. Just how they all fit together was not clear to me.

Maybe for a reader with a stronger background in Korean culture, this book would be much more meaningful.

Thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for sharing this ARC.

Han Kang’s We Do Not Part is one of the more disorienting, unsettling books I have read in a long time. And I mean that as a compliment.

We Do Not Part begins in a dream and, just like the confusion you can experience upon waking, it continues to keep us off-kilter as the character awakes and we land smack dab in the middle of someone’s thoughts. And this someone has apparently holed up in an apartment for some time, not going out or interacting with anyone else. And I say “someone” because the narrator doesn’t take the time to introduce themselves; we are privy to their thoughts but they don’t appear to be aware of an audience. I was reminded of the rather solitary and isolated characters in Han’s Greek Lessons.

Eventually, this person (I’ll leave the discovery to you), is drawn back into the world by an urgent request from an old friend to come to the hospital. This subsequently sends our narrator on a quest to Jeju Island on the friend’s behalf.

We Do Not Part puts dream, memory, history, and reality into a blender and stirs them to keep readers constantly off balance. Like the ever-present snow in the story, edges are blurred, objects obscured. It’s cold and there’s a pervasive sense of danger.

I happened to be in the country when I read this. It was cold and snowy and there was at the time a sense of anxiety about what was to come. This book played right into that, got into my head and would not let me go. That speaks to the book’s ability to conjure a powerful feeling, but it did make it harder for me to gather my thoughts.

If I was a betting person (I’m not), I’d say We Do Not Part seems like a shoe-in for the International Booker longlist. It’s a deeply meaningful, claustrophobic, atmospheric read that stays with you long after you’ve finished.

In addition, Kang is the recently named Nobel laureate which might give the International Booker extra impetus to longlist We Do Not Part (not that they should need it) as they did with Olga Tokarczuk’s The Books of Jacob in their year she was recognized by the Nobel.

I'm really torn on this one. The writing was beautiful and created such a haunting atmosphere as the novel progressed, but the pace was so slow for such a short read. I found myself wanting to read it but dreading it at the same time.

Overall though, this is still an amazing piece of literature, despite the slow pacing. The intense bond the author creates with the main character as she reflects on her life and the people in it will leave you a little broken, but in a way that will also leave you feeling more connected with humanity.

Thanks to netgalley for the ARC of this novel. This was my first Han Kang and I can see why she's a lauded writer. This book is atmospheric and sad, almost dreamy while also recounting some truly horrific parts of the massacre that happened in Jeju.
By the end I wasn't sure what the narrator had experienced and what was a dream sequence, but it didn't really matter by that point. The questions I had about the bird, and about her friend, they all just kind of melted away as I got further into her friend's mother's memories. I will think about this book for a long time.

4.5 stars. This book is so important. It tackles an understudied and not well known (at least not to me) era of violence in S. Korea in the years leading up to the Korean War. Like all of Kang’s books that I’ve read so far, this book seamlessly tackles aspects of the human condition with heart and gorgeous prose. This made me go on a Wikipedia dive to figure out how much of the history involved in this book I’ve somehow missed.

My main issue/struggle with this book was the mixed perspective and nonlinear timeline. Because it’s on a topic I’m so unfamiliar with, I got lost a few times and had to double back quite a bit to try and piece the story together and the family history of our main characters. Even so, I think this book is beautifully done and worth a read. I’ll probably reread it (in one go next time to avoid losing my train of logic with breaks or other books mixed in) and rate it even higher next time around.

The main character and first-person narrator of We Do Not Part by Han Kang knows her scientific trivia. Interesting facts percolate in Kyungha’s mind and drip meaningfully into her narration — especially, in Chapter 4: Birds, when she’s freezing her butt off at a rural bus stop in a snowstorm.

Kyungha is quiet, introspective, and extremely solitary. She’s a writer. She has spent significant time in archives fusing fact and narrative together. But no longer. Writing has wrecked her and her life.

In We Do Not Part, we meet Kyungha coming out of a housebound state, rising from the floor of her new Seoul apartment. Loneliness, migraines, and appetite loss have immobilized (and practically starved) her. She explains, in one of my favorite lines from the book: “I had not reconciled with life, but I had to resume living.”

She resumes living when her hospitalized friend needs her to travel to her home and take care of her pet bird.

Throughout the book, I got the sense that we are quite lucky, as readers, that Kyungha takes time to share this story with us at all. She doesn’t have the energy, vigor, or enthusiasm to offer information willy nilly. Given how her last book emotionally drained her, her sharing now has to serve a purpose and be efficient. Even for her own narrative, the effort it takes to tell pulls from energy she doesn’t really have.

I'm so glad Kyungha found the strength to share her story to save a bird. It's beautiful, sprawling, spiritual, and moving.

Thanks to NetGalley and Hogarth for the eARC!

This was such a emotional story, told with such depth and rawness. I breezed right through this book, and I can't recommend this book enough. This was my first Han Kang book; I can't wait to read her other works!

We Do Not Part by Han Kang is such a phenomenal writer.
I really enjoyed reading another well written story!

Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for providing this eARC.

We Do Not Part follows Kyungha, whose recently injured friend Inseon asks her to care for her pet bird on Jeju Island.

I shouldn't have been surprised at how much I adored this new book from award winning author Han Kang, but it was my first read of hers, and it truly blew me away. The prose is intricate and gorgeous, and the story equally so. Flitting between moments like in a dream -- or a nightmare -- kept me on my toes, and kept me wanting to know more. Despite the sheer amount of things going on, this also felt like a quiet read, and frequently eerie, so much like a snowy winter night in the middle of nowhere. And it makes sense, in the end, why the narrative feels so tonally haunted -- Kang eventually leads us to Jeju 4:3, a massacre I had never heard of before this book. Even before it's at the forefront of the narrative, the horrific events touch every page of this book, and it is sorrowful and transformative.

I picked up Han Kang's entire backlist after finishing this book, and I'll almost certainly be a reader of every forthcoming book.

Han Kang has crafted a beautiful puzzle of a novel. The writing is evocative, the subject matter devastating.

Narrator Kyungha wakes up from a recurring dream: snow, a beach, a forest, tree trunks, a crowd of people. She's disoriented, the heat is stifling, she's not eating and her headaches are relentless.

Kyungha is an author, she's written a (controversial?) novel about the 1980 uprising and subsequent massacre which took place in Gwangju, South Korea. A colleague with whom she's collaborated in the past, documentarian turned woodworker Inseon contacts Kyungha unexpectedly, and ends up asking for a huge favor that sees Kyungha traveling from Seoul to Jeju Island.

This might sound straightforward but We Do Not Part is anything but. Kang uses the framework to dive into the Jeju uprising and subsequent massacre which took place on the island in 1948, in response to the UN/US sponsored elections which Koreans feared would permanently divide the country. Through news articles, interviews, films, photographs and conversations between Kyungha and Inseon, whose parents were survivors of the 1948 uprising, Kang fills in the picture, in pieces, of that part of Korea's history.

The history is tragic. Thousands of people killed or disappeared. Families never knowing what happened to relatives. Mass burials, unmarked graves.

I was mesmerized by this novel. The prose was visceral - I felt the coldness of the snow, the darkness of Inseon's house, the viciousness of the soldiers. The way Kang unspooled the narrative was haunting. Brilliant. Unforgettable.

My thanks to NetGalley and Hogarth Books for the digital ARC.

This translation by Nobel Prize for literature winner Han Kang came out last week and it took me a minute to get used to her style and storytelling but once I did I was immersed. Kang's writing is poetic and lyrical and I wasn't sure at all what was real or what was happening at first, being honest here. I am not smart enough to know what all the snow represented, but I'm sure it represented something. But it's when we get to the meat of the book - meeting the narrator's friend to discuss making art/film to cover the Jeju uprising - that I was hooked. This book covers something I knew nothing about - the Jeju uprising of 1948 and 1949, where 30,000 people were killed in government/military perpetrated atrocities, which, according to accounts, involved gang rape, infanticide, and mass execution of civilians. Atrocities perpetrated with the complicity/aid of the US military. The story pieces together accounts and research so that the filmmaker can tell the story. But it is a deep scar with long felt wounds. This was great. (once I figured it out/it got going).

Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for the review copy. We Do Not Part is out now.

We do not part is an eagerly awaited novel by Nobel prize winning Han kang. It is the story of two friends in North Korea. Kyuhang receives a call from inseon asking her to come visit in the hospital as she has injured herself. Inseon begs kyuhang to return to an island jeju to save her bird ama. Kyuhang reluctantly agrees and finds herself trekking to the island in a snow storm and plunging temperatures. Her arrival at her friends house though will cause her to experience a greater feeling of darkness as she relives a traumatic part of Korean history on her quest.

This is dreamlike book that provides voices of the past a chance to speak through Kyuhang. Nearly reading like a fever dream , this is an eye opening exploration of the historical trauma of a nation. This is a heavy read and can be confusing at parts as the narrative slips between time and place. This provides readers with much to learn about a dark chapter in North Korean history.

Thanks to the publisher for providing this arc via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

WHEWWWW what a book. This was beautiful and soooo unsettling. I was so nervous and anxious the entire time reading this. It gave me I’m Thinking of Ending Things vibes because I didn’t really know what was real and what wasn’t and what was fully going on until the end. And even then I was like whaaaat. This was so heartbreaking and even more sad because it is about a massacre that happened in 1948 on a Korean island where hundreds of thousands of people were killed. Holy f. I am so unwell. 5 freaking stars.

https://wesleyanreviewofbooks.wescreates.wesleyan.edu/uncategorized/violent-images-harsh-landscapes/

What a heartbreakingly beautiful book by 2024 Nobel Prize for Literature winner Kang. First published in 2021, the English translation is now out. The story begins by showing narrator Kyungha’s grief and isolation as she withdraws from the world after loss, and the nightmares that plague her after writing a book about a historical Korean massacre. When her friend Inseon is injured and brought to hospital in Seoul, she asks Kyungha to travel from Seoul to the island of Jeju, off the coast of South Korea to care for her bird Ama.

What follows is Kyungha’s journey to Jeju in the driving snow. At Inseon’s house, the story becomes otherworldly, and changes to a haunting narrative about the Jeju uprising of 1948-49 and the horrendous atrocities that were committed by Korean police and military to stamp out a local uprising.

Snow is the dominant metaphor in Kyungha’s journey. Snow covers all manner of past sins and hurts, blanketing everything in a muted, echoless silence. It’s comforting in many ways, fresh and new, white and dazzling, but also an aftermath. In one unforgettable passage, two sisters in decades past wander through the field of a mass killing, brushing snow gently off the faces of the dead in order to find their murdered kin.

Kang’s book has spurred me to do a bit of reading about mid-20th century events on the Korean peninsula. As recently as 2008, a mass grave was found under the Jeju airport, and in 2019 the government reversed military court rulings against Jeju islanders, clearing the victims’ names.

This isn’t the story I thought I was getting when I read the first few chapters, but I’m glad that it is the story that I got. Kang was able to show me the Jeju Uprising through the voices of the past and present, using her characters to bring it to life, brushing the obfuscating snow off the traumas of the past and bringing them to light.

Thanks to Random House and NetGalley for a gifted copy for review.