Suffocating. Terrifying. Moving. These are the words that come to mind to describe my experience after reading ‘Impossible to Say Goodbye’, the new novel by Han Kang, the South Korean writer who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2024. Forced to summarize the plot of this book, published In its original language in 2021, it would have to be said that it tells the story of Gyeongha, a writer tormented by the consequences of writing a book about the Gwangju massacre. occurred in May 1980. NOVEL ‘Impossible to say goodbye’ Author Han Kang Publisher Random House Year 2024 Pages 256 Price 21.90 euros 5This is, obviously, a fictional transcript of Han Kang herself and her book ‘Human Acts’, by 2014. At the worst moment of his crisis, Gyeongha has even drawn up his will. A message gets her out of those suicidal ideations. His friend Inseon, a former documentary filmmaker with whom he worked for several years reporting in conflict zones, has had an accident in his carpentry workshop and is convalescing in a hospital in Seoul. Gyeongha goes to visit her and, once there, Inseon asks her for a favor: to go immediately to her house on Jeju Island, from where she has been transferred in an emergency, to take care of Ama, her parrot, who has been left alone. . An endless snowstorm turns this seemingly banal argument into an odyssey and hell. But does this say something truly important about the novel? It focuses on a writer tormented by the consequences of writing a book about the Gwangju massacre. The story takes place in the microscopic dimension of snow crystals (a fixation that had already dealt with in ‘Blanco’, from 2016) and the open shots of the most horrendous massacres suffered by the Korean people in the mid-20th century. A framework that goes from the intimate to the historical in which these two characters, these two friends, look at each other, talk, listen to each other and understand each other. They are also united by two nightmares. The nightmare of History, as Joyce would say, and the recurring nightmare that torments Gyeongha: a hillside full of black trunks, “slightly tilted and curved, like thousands of emaciated men, women and children walking head down in the snow.” One senses that it is, deep down, a single nightmare. The novel moves towards this confirmation without the fact of sensing it taking away an iota of intrigue and surprise from the plot. ExorcismGyeongha proposes to Inseon to materialize the image of his dream in an artistic installation, like a kind of exorcism. Both postpone the task year after year until Inseon decides to take over the nightmare and do the work on his own. This decision fosters a new approach and leads Gyeongha to search for the answers to those questions that she has not dared to ask her friend: why did she leave a promising career as a documentary filmmaker to become a carpenter? Why did he stay living on Jeju Island, in the old, isolated family home, even after his elderly mother died? And, above all, why so much loneliness? Among these questions, Han Kang’s gaze unfolds, thriving, like the flowers that grow in the interstices of the asphalt, in the small, narrow and distressing spaces, to find new forms of beauty, freedom and calm, in the midst of a fierce world. In ‘Impossible to Say Goodbye’ beautifully translated by Sumne Yoon, there are pages that are some of the best that has been written in this century and that will probably continue to resonate, in their low but constant murmur, for years to come.
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