Exquisite and profoundly disquieting ... I found no answers in this deeply mysterious and often eerie novel. ... Han’s radiant intensity, her singular ability to find connections between body and soul and to experiment with form and style, are what makes her one of the world’s most important writers.
Lushly poetic ... While narratively the novel comprises just two voices, the memories and spirits of many thousands occupy its pages, and especially in its latter half, the voices feel as if they emanate from an almost ethereal plane of existence ... [A] masterpiece.
Astonishing prose ... Showcases her awe-inspiring skill ... The effect is riveting, albeit challenging ... This novel is a rewarding endeavor, especially for readers familiar with Han’s oeuvre who can recognize it as a mosaic that artfully pieces together her long-simmering ideas on reckoning with historical atrocities, fighting to expose state-concealed truths and finding connection in our shared humanity despite inevitable suffering.
Characteristically light touch ... Han’s novels never make direct accusations, but her very tact makes the implied indictment all the more devastating. She draws American readers into foreign calamities that their own forebears had a hand in creating, and then offers a very limited kind of redemption—the chance to discover, for themselves, that legacy of shame.
The sharpest writing in We Do Not Part is Han’s historical reportage ... This is a novel unafraid of poetic cliché, of going where no writing workshop student is advised to go: It opens with a dream of falling snow, rising water and graves ... But how petty it seems to quibble about overwrought verbiage in a work of fiction so deeply freighted with real tragedy that its heaviness can scarcely be overstated. And when the translated prose is at its most theatrical, it’s usually in the context of personal feeling and gesture rather than the ravages of war .... Chilling.
The novel contains, but does not really synthesize, the two sides of Ms. Han: the dark fabulist, whose presentations of anguish are symptomatically obscure, and the chronicler of historical crimes, whose descriptions are direct and documentary. I prefer the former guise...but it is likely the work of the latter that earned Ms. Han the Nobel. Whether the dueling impulses can be integrated is a question that will attend her writing to come.
Kang brilliantly examines the breadth of human relationships—from unconditional mother-child bonds to timeless friendship to heinous inhumanity. e.yaewon...returns here with Morris to gift English-reading audiences with tragic terror, luminous insight, and ethereal glimmers of hope.
Poetic, starkly beautiful ... Moves to its own disorienting rhythms, and at this point in the narrative, a reader will likely be both spellbound and unsettled. We feel the chill and isolation of the snowbound island ... Profound.
Indelible ... The result is a meticulously rendered portrait of friendship, mother-daughter love, and hope in the face of profound loss. Han is at the top of her game.
