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[4.5 stars] One could say We Do Not Part is an amalgam of Han Kang’s previous works: the surrealism of The Vegetarian, the examination of traumatic historical events in Human Acts, and the poetic starkness of The White Book. Here she dips into autofiction and shines a light on the atrocities committed on Jeju Island in 1948.

The book begins with a dream. Evoking woodcut prints, the white snow falls on bent and blackened tree stumps evoking the image of human form. The dark sea rolls in, threatening the trees (or are they people?) as Kyungha, our narrator, anxiously watches. She awakens to a sweltering day in Seoul, a sharp contrast in both weather and mood. Her nightmares have haunted her since she began researching a book she published four years prior about an uprising that resulted in countless deaths. But she feels unsure if these dreams are connected to that event, or something else...

Kyungha's longtime friend Inseon texts her asking for help, immediately. She's in a hospital in Seoul after an accidental while woodworking, coincidentally on a project the two had conceived together years ago but never saw to fruition. Inseon asks Kyungha to return to her Jeju Island home to feed her pet bird who was left behind in the wake of Inseon's accident. Kyungha arrives on the island in the midst of a snowstorm that obscures not only her vision but the story's grasp on reality. From there we move into an almost dreamlike state with the characters as past and present unfold together, woven into a tale that attempts to illuminate and reflect on the harsh realities of their nation.

Kang has explored the human body throughout her oeuvre. She seems to have a fixation on how the human form can both bring forth life and quickly snatch it away. The remnants of humans lost to acts of violence permeate this story. But so too do the shallow breaths, the radiant heat from blushed cheeks, the crunch of snow under feet. These vivid images pull the reader along, like stills in a slideshow.

There also seems to be a fascination with recording history, a theme I notice popping up in many novels I've read in the last year or so. From newspaper clippings, documentary films, journal entries, letters, and novels (such as this one), there's an attempt through the characters, and seemingly Kang herself, to put a pin in history in some way. To fix the eye on something we so easily can look away from, or refuse to ever see at all. Many times our narrator forces herself to look, at wounded fingers, unfathomable separations, in the name of remembering.

At one point a character says something about love being an agony. That to love is to make oneself vulnerable: physically, emotionally, spiritually. And yet there seems to be no other option. Humans continually seek out love in all its various forms. Those are on display here: from mother and daughter, to brother and sister, friend to friend. The partings we experience in life don't seem to be as tangible as they feel. Perhaps there's something more threading us together, across time and space, through history and the present, in blood and snow.