I thought of Kingsley Amis as I read Han Kang’s We Do Not Part

We Do Not Part is a 2021 novel by South Korean author Han Kang , republished in English translation this month .

The main action begins when Kyungha , an emotionally troubled writer living in Seoul , visits her longtime friend Inseon in hospital.

In the story, Insean asks her friend to travel to her remote mountaintop home on Jeju Island to feed her pet bird.

We Do Not Part is about the difficulty of processing trauma and finding one’s way through suppressed historical material.

Some readers may find the novel's atmospheric intensity and dream-like quality rewarding, but I found that it diminished the emotional weight of the atrocities the author and her protagonist uncover.

Like The Vegetarian before it, we are preoccupied with the need to feel empathy for strangers.

Kang ’s work is not political in a narrow sense, it is worth noting that her philosophical priors and guiding project of radical empathy do seem to align with the broader enterprise of the global Left .

There is definitely a way to deal with this harrowing historical material, but Kang 's exercise in literary experimentation thwarts rather than advances her concern for the suffering of everyone.