Nobel Prize winning novelists tend to be oblique, highly “literary,” the type of writer we hope to sample and admire but tend to slide past. Thank goodness I did launch into We Do Not Part, the most recent book by the Korean winner of last year’s Nobel. When I say “launch,” perhaps I mean “wade into,” for the book’s introduction is a no-holds-barred, strange section in which the heroine, a novelist with terrible health, flirts with starvation and suicide, all alone. Until she receives a summons from an estranged longtime friend, in hospital with severed fingers… When the writer is bestowed a quest to go rescue the friend’s budgerigar on the remote southeast island of Jejun, the reader is quite unprepared for the phantasmagorical trip to reach the bird and, from there, the real topic of the novel, the unfurling of a documentary film project pursuing the 1948-1950 anti-communist massacres of tens of thousands, including, it turns out, the hospitalized friend’s family. If my description sounds unhinged, the novel does leap from the ordinary to the examination of genocide, yet Han Kang maintains pinpoint plot precision. The writing is lyrical and figurative, the prose lusciously descriptive, the scenes hallucinatory. The net effect is a stunning, angry, inconclusive examination of loyalty, art, morality, and amorality. We Do Not Part is a claustrophobic yet controlled semi-masterpiece.
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