I received an advanced reading copy of this novel from Penguin via NetGalley.

I didn't know what to expect going into We Do Not Part, because I never actually read the blurb before starting it. I just knew that I love Human Acts and the few pieces of Han Kang's short fiction that I've read, as well as the story "Heavy Snow" that appeared in The New Yorker late last year as an excerpt from this novel. I'd liked that piece a lot, and I really wanted to see the longer work that it came from. 

It turns out that "Heavy Snow" is only sort of an excerpt from We Do Not Part. It takes pieces from a longer sequence - the majority of Part 1 of the novel, as it turns out - and abridges them, re-ordering and recontextualising them and adding new material to make the ellisions work. It's a seamless piece of work, and though "Heavy Snow" is a piece of this novel I think it's different enough that it stands alone. In its extended form here, that story takes on much more weight. 

The first act, following Kyungha's journey from the hospital in Seoul into the forests of Jeju Island in the grip of an unending snow storm, is simply beautiful. It's quiet and contemplative but at the same time urgent and scary, and even though the stakes are on their face quite small - will Kyungha arrive at Inseon's house in time to prevent her pet bird from dying? - they're no less meaningful, underpinned as they are by the weight of years of friendship and obligation, by a history between these two characters that's shown to us only in small pieces. 

The quiet beauty and escalating tension of Part 1 do an incredible job of priming us for the emotional impact of the rest of the novel. Once Kyungha reaches Inseon's home the story shifts into something that feels like a companion piece to Human Acts, as she is haunted by Inseon's past and discovers records around the Jeju uprising and massacre of 1948, in which the Korean government slaughtered thousands of civilians. I admittedly know very little about Korean history but, as with Human Acts, Han Kang presents the events she's concerned about in such a stark, unflinching way that it doesn't matter. 

We Do Not Part's narrator is, herself, a writer who has previously written a novel about the massacre following the Gwangju uprising in 1980 - the same subject matter as Human Acts. Here Kyungha laments that she didn't tell the whole story in her book, that she allowed some of the atrocities to go unremembered. The final act of We Do Not Part grapples with ideas around forgetting and how we remember the dead, and how the past haunts the future. 

This is a book with pain on every page, from Inseon's horrific injury at the beginning, to the frozen pain of Kyungha's journey and the uncovering of the terrible history in the back end of the novel. Kyungha, too, suffers with debilitating migraines, one of which grips her for most of the opening section of the novel. Both of the characters spend the entire book in pain that's exacerbated by their attempts to keep the past alive, and it would be easy to ask whether it's worth it. But the book closes with images that remind us that no matter how painful it may be, remembering is always an act of love. 

We Do Not Part won the Prix Médicis étranger for its French translation, and I'll be very surprised if this English rendering doesn't appear on the International Booker Prize shortlist later this year.