Reviews

• Forgetting and Memory

  In the novel, symbols like snow and parrots appear, and the author Han Kang imbues each of these elements with profound meaning. That is precisely why, upon reading once, twice, and three times, one comes to understand with the realization, "Ah, now I see." In particular, the scene where a parrot, which has died carefully wrapped in a beautiful handkerchief despite the frozen ground on a cold day, is buried was especially striking (Part 1, Birds, 6. Tree). This scene is also an act of ritual to forget the painful past. To enjoy Jeju Island as a tourist destination, one must forget the painful past (The Jeju uprising). Similarly, the Korean people must forget the painful history of their struggle to realize democracy in order to enjoy capitalism. The principal theme of Han Kang's work is "forgetting and memory." The author's warning is that we are forgetting too easily, far too easily. The parrot in the novel repeats the same words, but it understands nothing of their meaning and speaks only by instinct. We too must reflect on whether we truly feel the meaning of "democracy" as we speak it. Han Kang continues to warn us constantly: are we forgetting? "Let us not forget. Let us remember." The most painful scene I encountered was the scene that Inseon's mother experienced in her childhood. After the massacre ended, Inseon's mother had to return to the elementary school playground with her seventeen-year-old aunt and search for the bodies of her family members among the corpses. Snow that had fallen before dawn covered each face thinly, frozen in place, and as the aunt wiped away the snow with a handkerchief, she said, "I will wipe it away, so you look carefully at the face" (Part 1, Birds, 3. Blizzard). The process of pushing aside the snow and identifying faces one by one appeared unimaginably agonizing. As I read this scene, I remembered my own mother's experience of the Osaka Great Air Raid in Japan during the closing days of the Pacific War. As a child, my mother witnessed American bombers turning Osaka into a sea of fire. The reason Osaka has become the modern city it is today is because everything was destroyed by fire at that time and then rebuilt anew. During the first air raid from March 13 to 14, 1945, the United States deployed 274 B-29 bombers and dropped approximately 1,700 tons of incendiary bombs on areas including civilian neighborhoods. American air raids continued seven more times after that, with a total death toll of approximately 15,000 people. Among the casualties, more than 4,000 were primarily civilians—women, children, and the elderly who were unable to evacuate. Of course, few people living in Osaka today remember the Great Air Raid. In my adolescent years in middle school, whenever I wanted to listen to music loudly at home, my mother would invariably scold me and tell me to turn it down. "The sound of bombers keeps coming back to me," she would say. At that time, I could not understand and was irritated, but looking back now, I realize that the loud music likely evoked the roar of the B-29 bombing. My mother has often told me that when the air raid siren sounded and she was hiding with her family in an air raid shelter, someone knocked on the door and shouted, "Run away!" Had she not gone outside at that moment, she would have died in the fire. Because of that nameless person, my mother survived, and therefore I exist here today. I am profoundly grateful to that unknown person. The second scene that pained me deeply was when Gyeongha's friend, documentarian Inseon, completed his third documentary and received feedback at a preview screening. The moderator introduced Inseon's latest documentary film with favorable commentary, but Inseon refuted this, saying, "This is not a film about my father. It is not about history, nor is it a visual experiment." The moderator then asked cynically, "Then what is this film about?" After this question, there followed a perplexed silence from the audience. After that, Inseon could no longer make documentaries (Part 2, Night, 4. Silence). I too have had a similar experience. I had the opportunity to present at an academic conference, but just before my presentation, a senior professor came to my seat and began criticizing me loudly in front of the other professors, as if making sure the surrounding faculty could hear. The presentation had not yet begun. What was even more shocking was that afterward, none of the other professors who attended the conference offered me comfort or sympathy. Everyone remained silent, watching the senior professor's expression. After that incident, I could not write papers for several years. Now I can write again, but the wound from that time still remains. So I understood deeply how Inseon felt when she could no longer make documentaries. After reading Human Acts and We Do Not Part consecutively this time, I found myself thinking about democracy anew. I believe that "democracy is not something given to us, but something we must protect and uphold." I have lived in both Japan and South Korea for a long time. When comparing the political culture and political consciousness of Korean and Japanese citizens, I observe that in South Korea, most citizens view democracy as something they must actively protect and uphold themselves. However, in Japan, I sense there is a lack of genuine democratic consciousness. While reading these two books, I reflected anew on the meaning of democracy and the differences in democratic consciousness between South Korea and Japan. The phenomenon of mass demonstrations demanding the impeachment of the president, as we see in South Korea, seems utterly unimaginable in Japan. Democracy is only possible when citizens possess such consciousness. South Korea retains this living consciousness because it has a history of fighting and shedding blood to achieve democracy. Although Japan's constitution explicitly codifies a democratic system, its people lack genuine democratic consciousness. South Korea possesses this consciousness because its people fought through history to win democracy.

• Mesmerizing book, bad translation

  The feverish dreamscape of painful memory draws us into this superb novel of transgenerational grief and probing into the heinous acts of the S Korean government against Jeju islanders in 1948 and beyond. Some 30,000 were killed and 70% of the island's villages were razed by security forces running amok. Han Kang's haunting tale of loss and connecting the past to an arc of authoritarian repression is remarkable. Sadly the translators do a poor job, interrupting the flow of the story with incorrect or poor word choice..& clunky writing....seems like a rush job that serves the author badly.

• Excelente edicion

  Excelente edición

• best

  awesome.

• A challenging but enlightening read

  I bought this book for my daughter. It was a little damaged, but that didn’t stop her from enjoying it, just as she has all of Han Kang’s works. In fact, she found it so gripping that she blazed through it in a single afternoon. Having discussed the book with her and hearing her thoughts on it, it sounds too literary for me and I wouldn’t like to read the detail of injury or the accounts of violence, but it was still very interesting to talk about it with her. It was equally fascinating and horrifying to hear about this so little talked about period of Korean history. I think the book will appeal to readers like my daughter, who are looking for books of exceptional writing quality that centre on important topics and the human experience and who enjoy works by East Asian authors. Readers should be prepared for a challenging but enlightening read.

• Beschadiging

  Boek was cadeau, dus blij dat ik het kon bestellen, net op tijd (voor oudjaar) binnen gekregen, was wel niet zo blij dat omslag beschadigd was, maar had geen tijd meer om terug te zenden

• Caring Eyes and Words

  This magnificent volume, WE DO NOT PART by Han Kang, awaits readers from all kinds of tastes. It is a rare understanding on mind. As a psychologist, I find the transitions between real and unreal that goes on throughout the book are difficult to discern. Even reading a translation of the original book, makes one wonder about this habit of mind to engage real with unreal. She leads the reader on a journey to misery lived by people of an area. Hundreds of skulls of innocent workers excavated from a mine is an aspect of it. Transitions from ‘formal speech’ to ‘familiar’ conversation introduces reader to another aspect of the complexity of human life—mythical and non-mythical—a woman transformed into a stone. Intuition and reasoning, the fast and slow modes of mind, mysteriously enters in dialogues. Even shadows matter, as they become real through imagination, and intervene the conversation going on with sound reasoning. Ambivalence towards loved ones is a deeper aspect of human nature. Perhaps Sigmund Freud was right that the moment love arises toward someone, the hate is born without awareness. It leaves open the question if there is hate only, as one finds in some narratives on mass killings of the members of a other group. In these tragic events the emotions flow naturally. Their language, inscribed in the genetic codes, unfolds through body and mind. The changes in minds of people are not restricted to lifetime. Dreams also come to stir mind in disguised ways, leaving no cue for reflection, a fit of rage or anger may occur. Even snowflakes are physical and mental curiosity. On the one hand, social bonding crosses all limits, taking kin and non-kin in its embrace. On the other hand, hate is surpassing all limits, no remorse in firing squads of innocent folk dead, mere suspicion, ideology, or perhaps striking terror. Events, such as ‘mid-November of 1948, the uplands of Jeju burned for three months and upwards of thirty thousand civilians were slaughtered’ belies reason. The near and dear of those who were exterminated by the other group, also suffer. Some of them get mentaly sick. Above all, the desire to meet lost loved ones remains for ever. Memories, artefacts, rituals, and even the DNA becomes the ways not to part with the loved ones, and hate the other.

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