When Han Kang published her International Booker-winning The Vegetarian (2015), translated by Deborah Smith, about a South Korean housewife who gives up meat and wants to become a tree, the novel slotted into a wave of English-language fiction about female appetites and male control. But the books that came next were harder to pin down. After Human Acts, about the 1980 massacre of student protesters in Han’s native Gwangju, came The White Book, in which a Han-like novelist reflects on the death of her baby sister while musing on wartime Warsaw. Then came 2023’s Greek Lessons, riddling to the point of opacity, about a divorced poet’s inability to communicate.
We Do Not Part, Han’s first novel to be translated since winning the Nobel prize for literature last year, has elements of all these books. Stark as well as ethereal, chronologically discontinuous, full of nested narratives – often structured as remembered conversations about remembered conversations – it exhumes historical horror but also swerves into hallucinatory magic realism without breaking the plausibly autofictional frame with which it begins.
