Violence in white

I never did take to snow. Even when it looked its ethereal best, I felt it was hiding within it a whooshing dread. When it falls, graceful, delicate, patterned, you don’t see its malevolence. You grasp it the next day when it acquires streaks of grey-brown and squats everywhere — on window sills, dustbins and footpaths. After emerging from Han Kang’s We Do Not Part, you may end up feeling the same way.

In the Nobel Prize-winning South Korean author’s new novel, snow is a beast alright — menacing, powerful, a fiend that hides as much as it reveals, and yet, achingly beautiful and wrenchingly desolate. If you have followed her work before, you would know Han Kang is ruthless in her portrayal of pain, and snow is but putty in her hands. She seamlessly shifts between the perfectly designed snowflake and the quiet hostility of the snowstorm, thus juxtaposing expertly the fragility of life and the inevitability of our collective mortality. 

There are other threads of similarities between this latest novel and her previous works, particularly the Booker Prize-winner The Vegetarian. The narrators of both are a curious mix of strength and infirmity; both go through extraordinary suffering, mostly alone, and both have shuddering nightmares of blood, massacres and foul death. The story arc is not dissimilar either — divided into sections, each of which has a distinctive voice of its own and all of which segues seamlessly into the central theme of the novel — the tragedies that everyone wants to forget about. 

Migraines and kimchi

In We Do Not Part, we have Kyungha, a writer who presumably is alienated from her family and lives alone in a bleak Seoul apartment with migraines and kimchi for company. She is racked by recurring nightmares and convinces herself every morning to write a will but cannot decide whom to address it to and ends up tearing it.

Kyungha’s despondency apparently stems from a book she wrote about a massacre in a place referred to by the author only as ‘G’. Haunted by a nightmare of standing in a field full of tree stumps that resemble torsos, she narrates it to her documentarian friend Inseon who wants to make a film on it. The two friends postpone the project every year. But, alas, the threads of their bond are loosening, as it often happens, slowly, imperceptibly. Until the day Inseon sends her an urgent text — she is lying in the hospital gravely injured while working on this very project. Inseon has a plea — she requests Kyungha to travel to her home on Jeju island to save her pet bird Ama, who would otherwise starve to death. Moved, Kyungha takes up this task but not without trepidation. She struggles through a snowstorm, power failure, and an all-consuming migraine and eventually ends up at Inseon’s cottage, forlorn and, yes, snowed in.

Behind the veil

It is in this house that things fall apart and come together in unsettling ways and the veil between what is real and what isn’t gets thinner and thinner. It is also here that Han Kang is at her brilliant best — her unsentimental style keeps you coiled even as you comprehend the character’s bewilderment, pain and the determined internalising of her loneliness. “When I open my eyes, the silence and the darkness are still waiting, unchanged. It feels as though invisible snowflakes fill the space between us. As though the words we’ve swallowed are being sealed in between their myriad melded arms.”

If you find the heaviness intimidating, know that in Han Kang’s writing, it sits lightly. Deceptively simple, the first two sections are page-turners in their own way — Kyungha’s trip to the hospital, her encounters on her way to the cottage and her recollections of her life and her on-off friendship with Inseon are all knotting their way slowly in your head without you realising it. And by the time you approach the third section, you realise every memory, every incident and every word has a purpose, a meaning that’s inexorably leading you towards the central violence that consumes the novel. “We’re sitting where the flames once spread. We’re sitting where the beams fell in and sent clouds of ash rising into the air.”

The massacre the novel refers to is the 1948 uprising on Jeju Island in South Korea where, according to some reports, nearly 30,000 civilians were killed by the South Korean military and the police, which viewed the protests as a communist insurgency. The rampant atrocities, burnings, and brutalities during the Jeju Massacre, as it later came to be known, were long suppressed in official histories.

Han Kang’s honed craft is such that she compresses the heaviness of this tragedy in astonishing ways — sometimes within ghosts tied up with biting ropes of pain, and sometimes in a snowflake, which too, one must concede, is a compression of all the magnificence of nature inside a millimetre.