"We Do Not Part" is a 2021 novel in Korean (and translated into English in 2025) by Han Kang, the recipient of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature. The book is a historical novel dealing with the contemporary history of South Korea. The book has elements that may be fantastic or magical realism, although how that relates to the rest of the book is unclear.
The narrator, Kyungha, is a documentary film-maker who has received an emergency message from a friend, Inseon, a partner in filmmaking and carpenter who is in the hospital after having sliced off her fingers with a saw. Kyungha must journey to the island of Jeju, off of the southern coast of South Korea, to feed her friend's bird. Kyungha makes it to the island, and after a difficult journey in a blizzard, suffering from an extreme migraine, and falling into a snowdrift, she finally reaches her friend's house, only to find her bird dead from starvation. After burying the bird under a tree, she passes out from exhaustion and the pain of a migraine, she wakes up to find her friend's bird back in its cage, and alive, and her friend waiting for her in the house, with no sign of the serious injury she had while in the hospital.
The book takes place on Jeju, and a major theme and background event is the Jeju Massacre, a real event where suspected communist sympathizers were killed by the right-wing government in the 1940s. Much of the second half of the book is Inseon revealing, in a series of nested flashbacks, how her family were victims of the massacre and other repressive measures of the time. This is a very serious topic, obviously, and the book ends up being a pretty grim book. I did find myself knowing more about the area than I did before reading the book, so it succeeded in raising my consciousness. The biggest question for me is how the fantastic or magical realistic elements added to a serious story about history.
I read a lot of books. And half of those books, I seem to be missing about half the content. Coincidentally enough, I read another work, Septology, by a recent Nobel Prize winner, Jon Fosse, that also had a scene where someone's collapse into a snowbank introduced elements of the surreal. And even more coincidentally, and somewhat ridiculously, I also recently read a book from a very different genre, Beach House, where the strong social message was interrupted with the supernatural. And I guess, going back a few months, not the first book by a Nobel Prize winner which uses Snow as a symbolic device during a bout of political persecution. So what is going on here? Why does a bleakly serious novel about human cruelty have a key plot point being a bird returned to life, and a woman's accidental maiming being reversed? If I had to guess, I think it is related to the title: aspects of our past that are strong will always return to the present, even when we think they are "dead". But how this supernatural element relates to the socially realistic story is a bit more complicated. Obviously, some people got it. The Swedish Academy obviously got something out of it. But for me, while I understand the quality of this novel, I am still trying to connect these two elements.