WE ARE NOT DIVING UPby Han Kang; translated by E. Yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris.
The novel of 2021 South Korean author Han Kang’s We Do Not Divide is now printed for the primary time in English, translated by E. Jaevon and Paige Anya Morris. Already internationally identified for “The vegetarian” who gained Booker Prize 2016Han Kang has simply been taken down 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature – the primary Asian girl and the primary South Korean girl to obtain this honor.
We Do Not Divide takes on the lasting devastation of the violent suppression of the Jeju Rebellion of 1948 and 1949, in all probability unknown to many American readers regardless of the complicity of america army within the massacres carried out within the identify of anti-communism. Between 1947 and 1954 on Jeju, an idyllic subtropical island off the coast of South Korea, at the least 30,000 individuals had been killed in principally government-perpetrated atrocities that included gang-rape, infanticide, and mass executions of civilians. The Rebellion of 1948-49 is seen by some historians as a precursor to the Korean Battle. Apologies have been issued by South Korean presidents because the twenty first century (Roh Moo-hyun in 2003, Moon Jae-in in 2018), however not by america, which then occupied southern Korea after World Battle II.
Han’s novel is narrated by Kyunga, a historian and author dwelling in Seoul who suffers from persistent ache (migraines, stomach cramps) so extreme that he contemplates suicide. She and her boyfriend Inseon, a director-turned-carpenter from Jeju, have lengthy deliberate to collaborate on an bold challenge, half set up and half documentary, that includes blackened logs in a panorama as a memorial to victims of violence. Minimize down timber stand in for lower down individuals—in Kyunga’s dream they’re “torsos”—simply as the ladies’s failure to finish the challenge signifies the impossibility of ever absolutely coming to phrases with the brutality of energy.
Originally of the ebook, Inseon calls Kyungha to a hospital in Seoul, the place she is handled – in a repetitive and excruciating means – for a extreme arm harm sustained in her carpentry studio. After leaving house in a rush, Inseon duties her pal with an emergency journey to Jeju, some 300 miles away, to rescue a pet chicken she fears will starve to dying whereas she lies in her hospital mattress. However a harmful blizzard thwarts the quixotic bird-rescue expedition, and Kyunga is left stranded within the dreamlike setting of Inseon’s compound, the place she finally discovers proof of her pal’s obsessive investigation into the household’s tragic losses throughout the massacres.
On the website of this household house in Jeju, the buried appear to rise once more, their shadows flitting throughout the partitions; lifeless and absent individuals and birds are intermittently current and the excellence between lifeless and alive turns into blurred. The previous flows unconnected into the current as new layers, witness after witness – a transmission of reminiscence between generations, from one broken girl to a different.
Inseon’s mom, a survivor of the Jeju bloodbath who died just a few years earlier, excavates the horrors of that interval herself; Kyungha realizes that Inseon found her mom’s analysis. The plot weaves collectively in a design that’s intentionally disorienting, Khan sparingly doling out revelations just like the sluggish peeling of an onion: unwinding timelines and data that at occasions is not definitely worth the hassle.
Essentially the most poignant textual content in We Are Not Divided is Khan’s historic reporting: the indelible pictures of youngsters summarily executed, mass graves in caves the place farmers and their households search refuge, siblings and fogeys endlessly separated by merciless a political crackdown on dissent that kills way more innocents than warriors. However it is a novel unafraid of poetic clichés, of going the place a writing seminar pupil would not be suggested: it opens with a dream of falling snow, rising water and graves.
The interpretation additionally typically veers into melodrama, with phrases “flying” from the lips, “a raging fireplace within the chest” and blood “flowing from this hollowed out house”. In simply 4 pages we now have “a physique that rejects, embraces, clings to. Kneeling physique. A pleading physique. A physique oozing blood, pus, or tears.
However how petty it appears to nitpick at over-tired verbiage in a piece of fiction so deeply charged with actual tragedy that its weight can scarcely be overestimated. And when translated prose is at its most theatrical, it’s normally within the context of non-public feeling and gesture, not the ravages of struggle.
For these of us struggling to maintain up with the overwhelming stream of stories about present conflicts in different international locations—together with South Korea, the place political upheaval is painfully reviving the iron-gauntlet ghosts of its previous—and the authoritarian risk unfolding in our personal , “We Do Not Separate” is a chilling reminder of the horrible invisibility of individuals and occasions which can be distant from us in house and time.
WE ARE NOT DIVING UP | By Han Kang | Translated by E. Yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris | Hogarth | 256 pages | $28
