We Talk About WE DO NOT PART by Han Kang [Teaser]
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You're listening to a teaser for Book Riot Podcast premium content. If you want to hear the rest, join us at patreon.com slash bookriotpodcast. For just $10 a month, get access to our full library of premium content, in addition to receiving early ad-free access to the regular episodes you hear in the show. Here we go. All right, we're going to talk about We Do Not Part, the new novel from 2024 Nobel Prize winners.

Laureate in Literature, Hong Kong, best known for The Vegetarian, came out in 2018, which I read right after. And I have to admit that I remember more the vibe than the plot of The Vegetarian. I went back and looked at it six years. I'm getting older. Be easy on me, folks. Let's see. What preview stuff we want to do in terms of setting the stage? So a South Korean writer, I guess I'd say it aloud. Mm-hmm.

Um, we got, was it a Patreon comment? People talking about weird, weird girl lit is like a big thing. Yeah. And the vegetarian is one of the recommendations. I kind of get it. Okay. I think I understand it is strange. I think it's hard to say. Creepy, elusive with an A, not an E. That's easier to distinguish between in print than in my bad pronunciation and my mumbliness that comes with this particular unit I was born with. Um,

And that vegetarian was much more, it felt like this is a small book, but it breaks into a wider cultural context and historical context. The vegetarian felt smaller to me. It felt both of them are quite feeble-like, like dark, feeble, strange. Before we get into it, Rebecca, what was your experience of reading We Do Not Part, sort of in a general big picture?

I really liked it, I guess, just to start straight off from the top. The last Hong Kong I read was Greek Lessons, and that's a short little book. It is very quiet. It doesn't have any dream elements, but it has kind of a dream-like feel.

Well, I think she remedied that with the next book. Yes, We Do Not Part has a lot of dreamy kinds of stuff. Maybe all is? Yeah. I had heard, you know, we try to go into books, I think both of us try to go in knowing as little as possible. I want to be untainted and kind of have the pure experience that the author is trying to give me. But I had heard that this was bringing to light a lesser known horror

horrible thing that happened in South Korean history. And as a person who doesn't have a huge or like very robust world history background, that kind of synopsis can put me off of a book or make me a little like, am I going to get it? Right. Like if I don't know about this event already. Should I just read a Wikipedia article? Right. Do I need to? To no shame. That's a good experience, right? That can be very worthwhile. It can be.

raised the question for me of, do I need to do homework before I read this book? And I did not do any homework because I didn't want to know again, what the event was that Kang was writing to. And I was really pleased how she unfolds it. And that it's not like, it's not a straightforward unfolding of this thing that happened, but that it unfurls over the course of the book. And like, if I wanted to come away, if I wanted to like be able to

speak a couple paragraphs at a non-existent dinner party about the event, I probably would need to do some Wikipedia-ing. Just to make sure you have your head screwed on right about what happened. But I got like the broad strokes of the thing and I certainly understand why it was horrific and why the characters in the book are experiencing and thinking about the aftermath of it in the way that they are. So that was a really present part of the reading experience for me. Yeah. The first half of the book

You don't know anything. I mean, this tragedy, massacre, horrible sequence of thousands of individual crimes perpetrated in mass doesn't appear until relatively late in the book, all things considered. A singular reading experience for me. I'm not even sure. I just finished it last night because I like to have it fresh in my mind and I'm still processing it. I'm not sure I've had a reading experience that like it.

I don't even know that it works in the I liked it vocabulary to come out with a psychological rich thing. We're in the sort of more like, did you like Schindler's List? It feels weird to say it that way. I was fascinated by it. I was compelled by it. There's a lot there. There are parts, frankly, I don't understand. And that could be the point of some of it. It could also be readerly content.

failure on my part. There's a lot in this particular book, and we can get into all of it. Let's see, I'm trying to think of general, I guess in terms of plot at the very beginning. So I had read this much, and I think we even talked about it in an It book situation or winter preview a little bit, just sort of what this is about. And it is and isn't what the synopsis kind of was that like this young woman

Or I don't even know how old are I. I think we're middle 30s, 40s. I think we're like middle to late middle age. Yeah, yeah. They're grown. Like they've had some time. They've been on the world for a while, which I guess matters more than anything at this point rather than specific age. Has been having this dream about a floodplain tidal area with a bunch of stumps in it. Like hundreds of stumps, these black stumps. That's where we start. And then she's thinking about her life and she's had some sort of horrible experience

it doesn't sound like violent or criminal but like her family has fallen apart like something's going on with her where she's living by herself

in near squalor starving herself she's not well Rebecca yeah it's not going great there's some some ailment we're not totally clear on physical emotional or both and every day she sits down to write her will and then kind of like Penelope at the loom undoing everything she loomed that day everything she woe she throws it away and then lives to the next day so that she can do it again yeah um

there's a great I thought beautiful quote that I had underlined where she says I had not reconciled with life but I had to resume living like something has happened where she doesn't want to keep going on and there's a real tension between the suffering she's experiencing and a desire for the end of that suffering but also that she doesn't really want to die yeah it's not even um it's not suicidal ideation that's how I read it was more like I just don't

know how to continue. Like I don't want to continue exactly. It's not that I don't want to be necessarily, but at some point she kind of comes out of the malaise at least a little, like enough to eat rice and take a shower and stuff. And then she gets a text message from an old friend. My geography here is weak, but in a different city at the very least, it takes some doing to get there saying come, right? It's elusive, cryptic and disturbing. She goes to find her friend who has had a woodworking accident and

nearly cutting off a few fingers on her hand. And I daren't wiki the, is this a real treatment? Every three minutes, the needles? Oh, trigger warnings? It's just triggers. It's like if they took all the triggers off all the Smith and Wessons and just put them in a pile, that's what we have here, I should say. Yeah, lots of medical traumatic stuff. And she's talking with her friend about what's going on in her life. Her friend has her own complicated situation, living experience, family history,

And she asked the main character, "I need you to go take care of my bird. It's been a few days and dude's gonna die." I never really thought about how small birds are and how much water they need and they can't go very long without water because there ain't much to them. "Ain't much to a bird" would have been a great show title in the old days.

And she undergoes a trek, a sojourn, a quest of a kind to fill the water dish of a bird. Yeah, through like a terrible snowstorm. In the middle of the sticks, nowhere, outside nowhere, there's like the last bus with a surly bus driver and she gets lost and like... Falls into a ravine? And she falls into the snow. And I don't...

I don't know where we're going to be on spoilers, but I don't think this is spoilers to say that we get to a point where I think it's at this point in hindsight where she's been sleeping in the snow and then gets up

that I'm not so sure that everything after that, I can't vouch for the reality of any of it, Rebecca. That's kind of where I have to leave my, this for sure happened on the table. Yeah. And going back and looking at the part, like the moments of the book that I had marked, when this main character, when Kyung-ha goes to the hospital and sees her friend and is recounting that she's been having this dream again, and the dream is related to work they had done together in the past. They

They're wondering together, like, what is a dream? What is memory? Where do the two meet and where do they blur? And that's kind of the experience of the whole book. But yeah, everything after she falls into this like frozen, falls down a hill and into like a frozen creek. Maybe it happens. Right.

Right. Maybe it, maybe it doesn't. Maybe parts of it happen. I mean, we don't know. Like it's not even that binary. Right. And there are so many different versions of the, if it didn't all happen, what did or what didn't and how is she dead? Is she hallucinating? Is it a fever dream? Like there,

And you don't really know that you're in that land until farther into the book, though. It reads as Lanier at that point that she has this accident. She spends the night curled up trying to stay warm outside and then gets up and somehow makes her way to her friend's house and finds the bird. And the bird is dead. And she buries the bird. And it's only after that that weird shit happens. Yeah.

And you're like, hold on, wait. So I guess this will be the end of the spoilers about plot because this is where it matters. It's like she's buried this bird, Ama. Is it Ama? There's two birds. There's only one there. I don't know. A lot of talk about how many birds there are and what they're doing. But...

She's buried this bird. Like we're very careful. We sew it in the thing. We put it in the tin. We put it in the frozen ground. She's not doing well and yet gets the shovel out. She's like bleeding from the face while this happens. I think what my, my, this is a dream is I don't know that she could have broken the ground with a shovel in her condition. Like, that's where I'm like, I'm not sure that this is actually possible physically, but we're, we're very clear that the bird is in the ground and then the bird is in the house flying around and fine. Yes. And at that point we're like, okay, okay.

Something else is going on. I really don't want to spoil the rest for people. I mean, I guess at this point we'll say if you care about spoilers, it's super interesting. This is literary fiction doing really interesting stuff. The subject matter is quite difficult.

You can see why this is the kind of work the Nobel Committee would be interested in. I think that's very clear. F*** off if they're going to say things about it. Basically. Is that right? Thanks so much for listening. Join us at patreon.com slash bookriotpodcast to hear the rest of the book.