Han Kang won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature in part for her 2021 novel We Do Not Part, which appeared earlier this year in English translation for the first time. This exploration of one of the darkest moments in modern Korean – and American – history works through a struggling female protagonist, somewhat similar to the lead character of her novel The Vegetarian, who finds herself called to the hospital bedside of a friend with whom she was once collaborating on a project about the Cheju genocide. This call leads to a visit to the sick friend’s house, where the lines between reality and dream start to bend, and it’s unclear whose memories we’re reading or how legitimate they are.

Kyungha is a writer who is deeply isolated and almost certainly depressed, often forgetting to eat, sometimes lying for hours on her apartment floor to escape the oppressive heat of the city’s summers. When she sleeps, she’s plagued by nightmares related to the massacres at Cheju, which inspired a scene in her latest, unfinished novel. She gets a call from Inseon, with whom she’d worked on a documentary of sorts about the same killings; Inseon is injured and will be stuck in the hospital for weeks, so she asks Kyungha to go to her house to feed her bird Ama. Once there, however, Kyungha gets stuck in the house without power due to a blizzard, and she begins hallucinating, or perhaps she has died and is experiencing something paranormal, with the result that she ends up hearing the history of Inseon’s family during the massacres.

Cheju (or Jeju) Island is located south of the Korean peninsula and currently has over 600,000 people living there. The residents of the island had begun protesting the planned election in the southern half of Korea, controlled by the United States at the time, because they believed it would lead to a permanent partition. In 1948, the communist party on the island organized a general strike, which turned into an armed insurgency. The strongman Syngman Rhee, the first President of the Republic of Korea, responded with brutal force, with the full backing and consent of the United States, killing somewhere between 15,000 and 100,000 people on the island. The Korean army forces killed children and babies and gang-raped women and girls. Tens of thousands of others were imprisoned for their alleged roles in the insurgency. After the massacre, it was illegal to even mention the government’s actions on Cheju until 1990, and South Korea didn’t hold a truth & reconciliation commission until 2003, when the government finally admitted they had committed genocide against the people of Cheju. (For more on the history of the Cheju genocide, the Wikipedia article is superb, as is this 2000 story from Newsweek.)

We Do Not Part deals with such heavy material that it’s hard to call it a “light” read, but Kang is such a strong prose writer – and some of this may be a credit to the translators, e. yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris – that it is an incredibly compelling, accessible read, even for someone (like me, before I read the book) with zero knowledge of the history involved. The first half of the book reads quite a bit like Kang’s novel The Vegetarian, with the protagonist’s alienation permeating all aspects of the narrative, while the second half veers almost into magical realism. As Inseon and her mother retell the histories of Inseon’s father and uncle from the time of the genocide, including witnessing massacres of civilians, Kang’s technique and prose give them a hazy quality to emphasize that these are ghosts or spirits or even Kyungha’s subconscious relating these stories.

I’ve been sitting on this post for four days now, and I think I’m just stuck on this one. I loved this book, but I also know this book has way more going on than I understood or appreciated. I’m not Korean and I didn’t know a single thing about the Jeju genocide until I read it and went to Wikipedia to figure out what I was missing. I’ll just stop here and say the book is fantastic, and I would recommend this even before The Vegetarian.

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In 2021, LitHub published a list of the 50 best classic novels under 200 pages, which included several titles I’d already read and enjoyed, so I copied the list into a Google sheet and started reading my way through it – often just reading whatever I found in bookstores on my travels. I grabbed Clarice Lispector’s Near to the Wild Heart at Changing Hands last month, since it’s on the list and takes its title from the same James Joyce quote that Japandroids used for their best album. It got the better of me; I did finish it, but I struggled because nothing happens in the novel. It presents the inner monologue of Joana, flashing back to her childhood and her present marriage to her faithless husband Otávio, with the sort of disjointed sentence structure of Joyce or Alfred Döblin or Virginia Woolf, all of whom I have found difficult to read. This one just wasn’t for me.

Christopher Isherwood’s A Single Man also comes from the LitHub list; he’s better known now for his Berlin Stories, which inspired the musical Cabaret, but this is a more serious novel and seems like it was considered his best work during his lifetime. The title character is George Falconer, a gay man whose partner Jim has recently died. George is British and now lives in California, in the house he shared with Jim and some pets he seems to have gotten rid of after Jim’s death, teaching at a local university and trying to find new meaning in his relationships with other people. The story moves in fits and starts, but picks up towards the end with two much more meaningful conversations, before the slightly ambiguous ending (I think it’s real, but I see online some people believe it’s a what-if). Falconer is a flawed character, pretentious at times, mopey at others, probably just not a very nice guy, but still makes for an interesting study. I can’t find an answer to this, but I wonder if John Cheever was paying homage to A Single Man in his novel Falconer, another influential gay novel that came out about 16 years after this one. The dialogue here can get a little stilted, but it seems to be in service of making George’s awkwardness in social situations – but not in terms of his own sexuality – clearer on the page.

Next up: Susan Orlean’s The Library Book.