Book Reviews1

• English(English)

  [Featured Review] Best Friends Forever

  South Korean Nobel laureate Han Kang—revered for her rich portrayals of the inner lives of characters who find themselves living against the grain of an unforgiving society—first catapulted to English-language fame after winning the 2016 Booker International Prize for The Vegetarian, her first novel to appear in English (though her fifth in Korean). Translator Deborah Smith—who also founded the influential UK press Tilted Axis, which specializes in work translated from Asian languages—learned Korean expressly for the purpose of translating from a language that, at the time, was vastly underrepresented in the English-language publishing marketplace. That trend has since reversed, in part due to Smith’s efforts and Han Kang’s pathbreaking global stardom. English-language houses now look to Korean literature—much as the success of Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2005) opened the market for books translated from Swedish. After The Vegetarian, a relatively hermetic and poetic work among Han Kang’s oeuvre, her next novel to appear in English, Human Acts (2017 in English, 2014 in Korean), also translated by Deborah Smith, dramatically shifted the English-language public’s understanding of her literary sensibilities. The novel revealed a deep connection between the very personal-psychological horror of bloodshed in The Vegetarian and twentieth-century Korean history—specifically, the pro-democracy Gwangju Uprising of 1980, in the course of which a large number of peaceful protesters, including young students, were shot by the military. Han Kang’s latest novel to appear in English, We Do Not Part (published in Korean in 2021) is a chilling ghost story and moving tale of friendship. It presents the interconnected lives of two friends—Kyungha, a writer, and Inseon, a photographer-filmmaker. The novel opens with Kyungha’s dream of a snowy hillside covered in truncated black trees that is simultaneously a cemetery; a tidal wave sweeps in, threatening to wash away all the dead. Inseon, who’s established a carpentry workshop on the island of Jeju, where she moved to care for her dying mother, agrees to build this cemetery and film it. But when she’s injured working on the project, she summons Kyungha to the hospital where she is undergoing a gruesome treatment—having her reattached fingertips stabbed with needles every three minutes to keep the nerves alive. She entrusts her friend with an urgent errand: to travel quickly to Jeju before Inseon’s pet bird starves to death in his cage. The journey from Seoul to Jeju requires a flight, two overland buses, and a half-hour trek through the woods. Kyungha sets out in the middle of a snowstorm serious enough to shut down all the villages she travels through, serious enough that she risks her life by making this journey—and indeed, she slips down an icy embankment and hits her head. Once inside Inseon’s island home, all the stories that have been swirling through Kyungha’s mind coalesce into conversations that might also be embodied memories. Soon it is unclear whether Inseon is alive or dead, a memory or a hallucination; the bird and his long-dead companion are suddenly both flying about; but what is definitely real are the many stories each of these women remembers and tells—testimonies to horrendous violence inflicted upon Inseon’s mother’s childhood family and, later, her father, as well as the stories of Vietnamese women recorded in a documentary Inseon previously shot about victims of the US war in Vietnam, in which Korean soldiers served alongside their US allies. And Kyungha reports that her recurrent dream of the flooded hillside cemetery began shortly after the 2014 publication (the same year as Human Acts) of her book about “the massacre in G—.” The novel’s richly embodied fictional universe is beautifully communicated in the translation by e. yaewon (who previously co-translated Greek Lessons with Deborah Smith) and Paige Aniyah Morris. In their deft hands, the prose combines the sort of quiet lyricism familiar to Han Kang’s English-language readers from Smith’s translations with a new insistence on the cultural rootedness of the work. English-language readers will acquire a seamlessly integrated vocabulary of Korean words like juk, halmoni, and Jeju-mal. The e. yaewon/Morris translation also feels more rhetorically straightforward overall than that of The Vegetarian, in which the prose is sometimes characterized by a syntactical foregrounding of logic in a mode grounded in Anglo-Saxon traditions, as in “However, if there wasn’t any special attraction, nor did any particular drawbacks present themselves, and there was no reason for the two of us not to get married.” A complex thought expressed in the e. yaewon/Morris translation of We Do Not Part, by contrast, might look like this: “Her demeanor—the fact that she did not ask anything else—was as calm and unwavering as ever, to the point where I almost felt sure that what I imagined she was thinking now might be true.” This is complexity expressed without the overt rhetorical gestures of logical organization, giving an impression of forthrightness and making the prose appear less specifically tied to an English-language narrative tradition. Like Smith’s translations, this new offering by e. yaewon/Morris stands out for its sharp rendering of the physicality of Han Kang’s prose, taking advantage of English’s rich store of verbs and verbal nouns to lend the descriptions a striking vividness. We Do Not Part—in my view, Han Kang’s finest novel to date—is memorable for the richness and nuance of the relationship Han Kang sketches between the two main characters, and also for the way she ties together various strands of historical memory with the novel’s present tense, creating a shimmering fabric of overlapping chronologies. The house and woodworking workshop in Jeju become a magical space of memory between life and death in which it is impossible to tell for certain at any given moment how many of the figures in the scene—whether women or birds—are alive and which are dead. It is as if the reader has journeyed along with Kyungha from the realm of the living to the realm of the dead, where the voices of witnesses from the past carry as much weight and hold as much reality as the young women recording and preserving them. In this place where trees, birds, and humans come together for shared moments of comfort, connection, and nourishing bowls of juk, we learn that bearing witness may be the most essential form of love.

  2026-02-05

  by Susan Bernofsky

E-News26 See More

• English(English) Others

  Han Kang Is Awarded Nobel Prize in Literature

  - / October 10, 2024

Related Resources18 See More

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  English(English) Document

  Fruits of Korean Fiction: Korean Short Stories and Novellas by Choe Jeong-hui
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  Korean(한국어) Document

  2021 Seoul International Writers’ Festival Final Report
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  English(English) Document

  [Cover Feature] A Mourning against Mourning