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.
Kang weaves this stomach-wrenching history into her poetic prose using nature ... Anything but predictable, even, at times, obscure. Kang uses a fragmentary structure punctuated by lyrical, dreamlike sequences to accentuate the collapse between past and present ... The novel’s ghosts are not flimsy holograms. Your hand cannot pass through them. Kang’s spirits are flesh and blood, their pain visceral and lingering.
Takes her style in exciting new directions ... At once bracingly concrete and thrillingly mysterious ... Many unsettled boundaries that she keenly balances throughout the novel ... It’s the very best kind of storytelling, poetic and ambiguous without ever once shying away from the horrible historic truth.
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.
Haunting and beautiful ... Resonant with conscience and revealed history ... As a bulwark against the loss of humanity, We Do Not Part is a best defense.
At its most compelling when peeking into Spotify’s internal strategies and its employees’ real-time reckoning with their implications. This is also where Pelly overplays her hand ... We are surrounded at all times by an ocean of sound, but Spotify is content to leave us stranded on our islands.
Han is, as I’ve suggested, a solemn writer, and you could say this is a dire message with which to imbue a novel. Yet it also has an element of optimism. Depending on the reader and the day, it can be reassuring, exhausting, or both to imagine that humans can continue to carry out our moral obligations even from beyond the grave.
Feels at times like a painstaking description of a cinematic art installation. Birds become symbols of fragile hope and dogged survival ... This disorientating, deeply metaphorical world, obliquely concerned with specific atrocities in Korean history, must have been an immense challenge to translate ... Highly original and moving.
Few writers are so unremitting on the subject of pain, which is, for Han, the truth of our mortality. Her impulse is compassionate, but it is bound to a concern with beauty and coldness ... If this sounds daunting, it reads wonderfully well. The first two movements of the book are a masterclass of poetic control.
Stark as well as ethereal, chronologically discontinuous, full of nested narratives – often structured as remembered conversations about remembered conversations – it exhumes historical horror but also swerves into hallucinatory magic realism without breaking the plausibly autofictional frame with which it begins ... Strange and unsettling.
Unfolds across three sections, growing into a complex structure like the snow crystals it so carefully describes, in prose luminously translated by e. yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris ... Her most harrowing and ambitious work yet ... Magnetic.
A novel of dreams and apparitions, whose significance resists simple interpretation ... A novel of snow. Peculiar as it may sound, the frozen vapor commands much of Han’s attention and inspires some of her loveliest writing ... Accumulate meaning as it falls through the novel. It is death, honor, time, memory, clarity, peace, life itself, a fabulously intricate and beautiful miracle that takes only a second to dissolve on your skin.
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.
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.
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.
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.
