Latest Nobel laureate’s work is haunted by questions. Don’t expect answers

In a 2024 speech accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature, South Korean writer Han Kang confessed that “I had lengthy misplaced a way of deep-rooted belief in people.” She questioned: “How then might I embrace the world?” Grappling with existential angst is a thread that runs all through Han’s fiction, most notably within the Man Booker-winning “The Vegetarian,” by which the principle character renounces meat and finally believes she’s turning right into a plant.

Han’s beautiful and profoundly disquieting newest novel to be translated into English, “We Do Not Half,” additionally makes an attempt to probe that elemental dilemma. Her elusive protagonist, Kyungha, too has undergone a metamorphosis. In the midst of her analysis for a ebook on victims of the lethal Jeju Rebellion of 1948, she finds she is not in a position to reconcile the inhumanity she’s confronted with a perception within the goodness of individuals. “Having determined to write down about mass killings and torture,” she displays, “how might I’ve so naively — overtly — hoped to shirk off the agony of it?” 4 years on, she’s completed the ebook however stays haunted by its topics. In consequence, “a desolate boundary has fashioned between me and the world.”

After we first encounter Kyungha, she’s left her job and ceased contact with most household and mates. Her personal life has crumbled “like a sugar dice dropped in water.” She’s spent months shrouded in gloom, cocooned in a flat outdoors Seoul, hardly ever rising from mattress. Excruciating migraines go away her with out vitality or urge for food; nightmares pervade her sleeping hours. One dream is extra vivid than the others. It unfolds on a snowy seaside hill underneath which numerous our bodies have been buried. Waves crash over their shallow graves, that are marked by hundreds of tree trunks jutting from the bottom like “black torsos.” Kyungha’s preoccupation with this picture leads her to succeed in out to Inseon, a documentary filmmaker buddy with whom she hopes to collaborate on a challenge memorializing that imaginative and prescient.

Inseon has moved from Seoul to the volcanic island of Jeju to look after her dying mom, who herself was traumatized by a government-backed bloodbath that left 30,000 lifeless. After her mom dies, she stays in her childhood dwelling, working as a carpenter. Someday Kyungha receives a textual content from Inseon, who’s suffered a grotesque accident whereas woodworking and is hospitalized in Seoul. She pleads with Kyungha to fly instantly to Jeju to look after her pet chook, a favor Kyungha agrees to do, although a blizzard makes getting there almost unattainable.

Snow is a personality unto itself on this novel, symbolizing each magnificence and hazard: “Because the snow lands on the moist asphalt, every flake appears to falter for a second. Then, like a trailing sentence on the shut of a dialog, just like the dying fall of a remaining cadence, like fingertips cautiously retreating earlier than ever touchdown on a shoulder, the flakes sink into the slick blackness and are quickly gone.” Han’s prose is translucent, shot by means of with poetic turns.

A bus from the Jeju airport can transport Kyungha solely to date, and she or he is left to stagger by means of snow banks to succeed in the distant hillside cottage whereas darkness descends. Freezing and disoriented, she burrows down, curling herself into a good ball. Practically dropping consciousness, she forces herself to evoke: “I needed to plunge my legs in, then pull them again as much as stroll by means of the snowdrifts. … The bushes round me have been more and more sunk in dusk and half smothered with snow. … I moved ahead, the sound of my legs trampling out and in of the snow the one factor to shatter the hush of the night.” Lastly, Kyungha spots the glow of a lantern and enters Inseon’s workshop.

Whereas alone in her residence, Kyungha had appeared to hover between hallucination and actuality; on Jeju, the road between the 2 evaporates. The storm rages outdoors, whereas inside, there isn’t any energy. The destiny of the chook is unsure. Kyungha has a premonition that Inseon’s situation has grown dire, however then her buddy seems to her — an apparition. At first Inseon is barely in silhouette, till: “The black, rounded type shuddered and grew lengthy. The physique was extending itself out of its huddled pose. … Its face, which had been buried in its arms, turned towards me.” After which a voice rasps: “Kyungha-ya.”

The 2 settle into dialog, as if nothing unusual is going on. Inseon assumes the function of host, making tea and lighting candles. They sit comfortably throughout from each other on the kitchen desk. Intermittently, although, Kyungha is conscious that her buddy’s presence could also be an phantasm, and that the actual Inseon could also be dying in her hospital room. We, too, turn out to be confused, not in a position to discern the actual from the surreal.

Within the sections that observe, the language shifts in tone, turning into reportorial, as Inseon narrates the saga of her household’s tragic historical past as witnesses to and victims of the Jeju bloodbath. It turns into clear that that is her mission in showing to Kyungha: Her buddy should bear witness. When Inseon finishes chronicling their story, she appears to fade. Kyungha now senses the presence of somebody or one thing that may or won’t be Inseon. She wonders: “Is that somebody you?”

Han has noticed that every time she works on a ebook, “I endure the questions, I dwell inside them. Once I attain the top of those questions — which isn’t the identical as once I discover solutions to them, is once I attain the top of the writing course of. By then,” she says, “I’m not as I used to be once I started.” Her characters expertise related transformations.

I discovered no solutions on this deeply mysterious and sometimes eerie novel. To learn “We Do Not Half” is to inhabit an unknowing. Whether or not Han’s characters dwell or die or exist in a liminal house stays a puzzle. We received’t study whether or not Kyungha is someday in a position to transcend her grief or revive “the wiring inside me that may sense magnificence,” or whether or not Inseon can survive her grave accidents. However Han’s radiant depth, her singular means to search out connections between physique and soul and to experiment with type and magnificence, are what makes her one of many world’s most essential writers. From one thing so simple as the strike of a match, she will be able to compose these phrases: “Up leaped a flame. Like a blooming coronary heart. Like a pulsing flower bud. Just like the wingbeat of an immeasurably small chook.”

As to how Han processes despair however doesn’t give up to it: “I understood that writing was my solely technique of getting by means of and previous it. … May it’s that by relating to the softest elements of humanity, by caressing the irrefutable heat that resides there, we are able to go on residing in any case on this temporary, violent world?”

Leigh Haber is a author, editor and publishing strategist. She was director of Oprah’s E book Membership and books editor for O, the Oprah Journal.