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Han Kang’s Latest Novel Mines Korea’s Bloody Past
We Do Not Part is the very best kind of story-telling, poetic and ambiguous without ever shying away from horrible historic truths.
Han’s writing is distinguished by this contentious marriage of soul and body, an abstract corporeality that places as much emphasis on physical humiliations — headaches, stomach cramps, bullet wounds — as the realm of dreams, hallucinations, and wandering spirits. By locating the military’s crimes on both physical and spiritual levels, Han refuses to consign them to the safe distance of history, lending her novel, and the very real story she is telling, the visceral immediacy of a blow and the lingering agony of a wound. But try as she might, she cannot fit these meanings together, haunted by a lingering realization that “life was exceedingly vulnerable … The flesh, organs, bones, breaths passing before my eyes all held within them the potential to snap, to cease — so easily, and by a single decision.”
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