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105th book of 2024.

One of those books that feels impossible to give an arbitrary rating to. On the one hand, Kang has written an incredibly deft novel about the Jeju Massacre in 1948, on the other, she has written an abstract novel that reads like sand falling through your fingers. Considering the novel's 400 page weight, there's not much to be said about where the pages go: a large swathe of the novel details the narrator waiting at a bus stop in a snowstorm, then walking through the snow, in the attempt to save her friend's budgie. The final hundred pages or so details the dreamlike investigation into her friend's family history and the Jeju Uprising. It is a book full of quiet but poignant images: a budgie hushing as soon as a cover is thrown over its cage, endless snowfall, shadows moving on walls, logs of wood painted black, a bus crawling through the snowstorm, missing fingers... These images all drift, like a snowstorm itself, and carry us through the incredibly weightless narrative. Like the movie in the novel that is planned but never made, the novel reads like an assortment of slides or images, hauntingly quiet, that flicker before your eyes. I can't say I 'liked' the book; I was unnerved by it, sometimes confused by it, but ultimately impressed by Kang's ability to write a novel about this diabolical historical event in a seemingly directionless and airy narrative. What persists in my mind most of all are the black logs standing in the snow, the shadows on the walls and the silencing of a bird.

Thank you to Penguin for the advance copy for review. We Do Not Part is published in English in the UK in February 2025.