Reading Han Kang (Gwangju, South Korea, 1970) could be compared to digging in the snow, and not because his most recent title, Impossible to say goodbye (2021; Random House, 2024, trans. Sunme Yoon), takes place during a heavy snowfall that leaves the protagonist isolated. No, the comparison is relevant because when you start digging you don’t really know what that white surface covers, whether it hides a flat terrain or a path full of dirt, of debris that one would prefer not to find. Because they prickle their conscience. Because they make you uncomfortable. Because they hurt, despite the passage of time, despite the distance. The snow never healed the wounds; He just plugged them. Reading Han Kang is letting the blood flow.
It is common, among writers awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, to deal with the issue of war(s), of historical memory; something that is not surprising, if we take into account the number of conflicts that devastated the 20th century and that many of them experienced directly, even firsthand (such as the Hungarian Imre Kertész, survivor of Auschwitz and Buchenwald), or through the testimony of their parents or grandparents. It is an important topic that has not been closed and that allows us to show the best and worst of human beings, in addition to addressing deep-seated ethical dilemmas.
Han Kang, the last winner, already delved into the matter in her novel human acts (2014), which Random House just re-released. The conflict was then the 1980 Gwangju massacre and the narrative was made up of fragments of different characters gathered in a chaotic morgue, a living image of horror. In Impossible to say goodbyeit is about the Jeju uprising of 1948in which between 30,000 and 60,000 people died at the hands of the South Korean Army. The massacre is part of the recent partition of the peninsula between the Soviets and the Americans, which caused outrage among workers due to suspicion of the military government and police charges.
Collective trauma
On the island of Jeju, where there was already previous unrest among the peasantry over the tax cost of agricultural production, the repression was fierce. But Han Kang does not intend to give history lessons, but rather to talk about the human dimension; and the beginning of the novel invites us to suspect that it will take that path. There are only two women, friends from their youth who life took on separate paths. One lives in Seoul and writes; sounds like alter ego of the author. The other moved to Jeju, where she took care of her mother until her death. His passion is cinema; They had a project together. Now he calls her for another reason: she is in the hospital and wants her to come to her house to take care of her parrot. Otherwise the bird will die.
The book is not about animal ethics, nor about the social and professional burden that caring for women entails for women, nor about the contemporary loneliness that implies having a distant friend as the only link in an emergency situation. No, it doesn’t go about that in the same way as The vegetarian (2007) was not an apology for veganism. At most, they are tertiary layers. When the protagonist arrives at her destination, a snowstorm has left her isolated, alone with a bird that she does not know if she will find dead. And in a house that does not belong to him, with some other people’s objects. Objects from her friend, but especially from her mother. A mother who died after suffering more than what her friend has told her.
The mother-child bond unites the intimate memory of the family with the collective trauma of the Jeju massacre. Decades have passed, the narrator belongs to another generation and there is no one around her to give voice to the past, so it comes through the documents she finds in the house and some strange hallucinations, the result of Gothic imagery that It makes complete sense in the context of the storm, the isolation, the fatigue, the fear and the bewilderment of finding yourself alone in an unknown place. Daydreaming as a literary device is controversial, but in Han Kang’s hands it does not fall into cliché: it communicates what it should communicate and provokes that restlessness so characteristic of it.
Silenced stories
In reality, the hint of pain is present from the beginning: the protagonist, who recently wrote a book that can be identified as human actssuffers nightmares. On the other hand, the project with her friend also starts from a strange dream, for which her partner had to cut logs and paint them black. Without knowing exactly where she is going, because not even she herself knows, Han Kang takes the reader by the hand through a dark tunnel, where he can only be guided by the shadows, but which has something that impels him to continue walking, which It attracts you like dark areas attract when you are in a low moment and let yourself fall into the abyss.
There is pain, too, in the friend’s wounds. Blood, punctures; Han Kang does not hesitate to call a spade a spade, nor to relativize the damage; Even in the hospital, the woman is able to recognize that hers is nothing compared to what so many victims of the human machinery of death have suffered. Below, other no less significant themes beat, such as the question about whether we ever know who our ancestors were (as immediate as the mother) or a test of how far one can go for a friend, to what extent empathy , solidarity or complicity weave a network that turns the family pain of one into the other.
Due to the choral nature of the voices that come to her, Han Kang connects with another Nobel Prize-winning author, the Belarusian Svetlana Aleksievich. From very different conceptions of the literary fact – the testimonial journalism of one versus the imaginative and experimental construction of the other – it can be said that they have similar sensibilities, common concerns: giving voice to the victims, acting as transmitters of the stories that were silenced. Literature thus takes on a social function; Yes, without ever losing the narrative demand, the aesthetic emotion, which in the end is what gives the creative text its soul, its emotion.
Migraines
The author has said from time to time that the migraines she suffers leave her in a state of stupor that in a way inclines her towards this type of writing, a state that manages to infect the reader. Despite being a very different novel from his masterpiece, The vegetarianwith Impossible to say goodbye once again signs a great book, an even deeper book if possible, which grows page after page and once again speaks of the violence of the human being crystallized in the body, in the battered bodies of the victims, the destroyed bodies, the dead, that resonate like a chorus of voices impossible to silence, because “the war never ended, it only remained in suspense.”
“Everyone remained silent, even the relatives of those massacred, because opening one’s mouth was equivalent to siding with the enemy.” Perhaps in the West the Jeju massacre is far away, but we know what violence, repression, and fear mean. We know the importance of collective historical memory. If official History is written by the victors, fiction acts as a speaker for others. Sometimes, so brilliantly that it penetrates deep down. If expressions such as knocking, hitting or shaking, applied to books, had not been repeated until they became trivial, they would be the type of epithets that would be applied to this narrator.
We don’t know where Han Kang will take us, but we know that we won’t emerge from its pages unscathed. We know that he will give us great literature, that will move us in unexpected ways. And, at the end of the day, you have to keep digging in the snow, go out into the open, clean it all, even if your hands end up cracked and your body trembling.
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