We Do Not Part

The latest work to be translated into English from the 2024 Nobel Prize for Literature Laureate, Han Kang, is finally here, and it’s pulled off a rare feat. By encapsulating everything she stands for as a writer, it is both a more than worthy entry point for new readers, and a literary feast that rewards long-term readers of her work.

In many ways, We Do Not Part feels like a natural progression of her earlier work, and yet it’s in the borrowings from her previous novels that something new and even more accomplished has been born. Largely focused on the 1948–1949 Jeju massacre and its decades-long censorship, We Do Not Part is considered by Han to form a pair with her novel Human Acts, which centred on the military crackdown of pro-democracy protests in Gwangju in 1980. Rife with poetic symbolism and a dreamlike quality reminiscent of The White Book, it also experiments with non-linearity, perspective and memory, unravelling with a beautiful sense of originality.

Across her bibliography, I’ve been awed by how consistently and precisely Han articulates where we are as a society, and the unspeakable things we repeat throughout history and perpetuate into the present and future. How these acts have become who many of us are – and that, quite horribly, it’s not shocking anymore. This preoccupation with violence is always coupled with an unshakeable conviction that we can and must keep going, because, as she writes in The White Book, there is no other way. And, indeed, the urgency of her conviction feels stronger here than ever; that it’s become more imperative than before to keep from slipping into the cycle of violence; to keep ourselves from parting with what makes us human, and with what makes us see each other as human. In her Nobel Prize Lecture, Han talks about the questions at the heart of We Do Not Part: ‘to what extent can we love? Where is our limit? To what degree must we love in order to remain human in the end?’