Two Good Books

 We Do Not Part by Han Kang

Korean history is generally mysterious, at least to me, and this recently-translated historical novel, We Do Not Part, provides a detailed description of events that I have never learned about. Specifically, on the island of Jeju in the late 1940s around 30,000 people were massacred in a campaign to destroy political viewpoints that differed from those of the emerging anti-Communist South Korean government. Although the facts of this massive number of deaths was suppressed for decades, it resounds in the novel, specifically in the life of one of the two main characters. The massacre looms over the very surreal plot, which takes place in around 2020. I have no idea of how a Korean reader would relate to the events — or even the extent to which they would be familiar to Koreans, but the shadowy atmosphere of the novel for an uninformed American reader is made more intense by the obscurity of the historic background. 

We Do Not Part is a first-person narrative by a woman who describes herself as unbalanced: she has been living alone and never leaving her apartment for a long time, eating very little, suffering from destabilizing migranes and digestive disorders, and exiting in a kind of solitary, hermit-like bubble. She begins by describing a dream — in fact a kind of hallucination — which she has shared with a friend who lives far away in a very isolated place: Jeju Island. She receives a summons to the bedside of this friend, who has suffered a hideous accident in the woodworking shop where she creates various art and practical items. The friend demands that she immediately leave the hospital, take a plane to the nearest airport near her home, and proceed by train, bus, and on foot to reach her house where he pet bird will soon die if not given food and water. The journey, which the narrator undertakes, becomes somewhat surreal as a blinding snowstorm nearly defeats her arrival there. 

Her arrival in the nearest small town: “If not for the chill of the icy particles falling and settling on my forehead and on my cheeks, I might wonder if I’m dreaming. Are the streets empty because of the storm? Or are the lights out in the small shops selling cold seafood soup and noodles in anchovy broth because it’s a Sunday?”

Once she reaches the friends’ isolated house, she finds the bird, which has died. Without any way to leave again she tries to make herself at home, but the power fails, heat and water are cut off, and the storm nearly freezes her. As she is becoming colder and colder, her friend appears, strangely no longer affected by the terrible accident that had befallen her. At this point, the narrator becomes uncertain if the friend’s presence is illusory, if her friend has come back from the dead, or if she herself is dead. She writes: “Or how if I kept turning your dream around in my mind, I would see shadows glimmering like fins inside a lightless aquarium. Is someone really here with me? I wondered. In the way that light in two different places becomes pinned to a single spot the moment one tries to observe it?”

A long conversation between the narrator and the mysteriously returned friend composes more than half of the novel, and the story the friend tells is of how she discovered her mother’s past, specifically her mother’s family’s history in the Jeju massacre. The revelations include both the stories of her parents and much detail about the brutal actions of the Korean government and the subsequent hush-up, creating a suspenseful and effective story.

The unreal illusion of the two women in the darkened and isolated house reminds me of some “existential” novels of the past, where there is a kind of suspension of the way that a reader and an author collaborate and agree on the conventional narrative methods that portray reality. Instead, there’s a raw version of existence at its most basic. The book offers numerous levels of historic, psychological, emotional, and relationship reality. It’s a brilliant novel.

From the New York Times: “Transforming real life into a haunting dreamscape, ‘We Do Not Part’ is about grief, tragedy, the weight of the past, and the painful but essential work of remembering, delivered by one of the most electrifying writers working today.” (source)

M Train by Patti Smith

Patti Smith was either famous or obscure in the 1960s scene in New York — it depends on who you ask. I admit that I didn’t know much about her until the mid-90s when she emerged from a long period of not being in the public eye, and performed on stage here in Ann Arbor with the poet Allen Ginsberg. A poster from 1996 illustrates their joint performance at Hill Auditorium. Years later, I read her prize-winning autobiography Just Kids, which documents her years in 1960s New York. 

Several years ago, this is what I said about their performance:

I distinctly remember that the audiences seemed divided between those who thought Patti Smith was a goddess and Allen Ginsberg an afterthought, and those (like me) who hadn't really heard of Patti Smith, but thought Allen Ginsberg was an American legend. I'd never seen her before, but had seen him at events in Berkeley or San Francisco in the 1960s, most notably the Human Be-In, a memorable Happening in 1967. His readings in 1995 and 1996 made a lasting impression on me -- hers, not so much.

Now I’ve read her second memoir, titled M Train, from 2011. It was interesting in a way, but I can’t say I’ve really gained any great interest in her or her writing. I was impressed at the numerous references to a vast number of authors and intellectuals that she included, but sometimes that seemed a bit hurried and superficial. The book jumps back and forth over various times in her life, and sometimes touches on the death of her husband, but it’s not in my view well organized.

Here is a passage that I enjoyed:

“I believe in life, which one day each of us shall lose. When we are young we think we won’t, that we are different. As a child I thought I would never grow up, that I could will it so. And then I realized, quite recently, that I had crossed some line, unconsciously cloaked in the truth of my chronology. How did we get so damn old? I say to my joints, my iron-colored hair. Now I am older than my love, my departed friends.”

I think you would have to be a serious Patti Smith fan to love this book. For me it was just OK.

Reviews © 2025 mae sander for maefood.blogspot.com