Han Kang won the Nobel for Literature this year (once again, my guy Krasznahorkai shut out), and I hadn’t read anything by her, so off to Amazon I went. Turns out I chose one of her slimmest books. Slim like a knife. Right in the gut.
The Nobel announcement strongly indicated she was a “trauma” writer in the general autofiction zone. There is a piece early on in this book that… if your chest doesn’t clench and your eyes don’t well, you’re probably dead. It was horrible, heartbreaking and perfectly weighted to destroy the reader.
What do the ghosts of this city do, these muffled early-morning hours? Slip soundlessly out to walk through the fog that has been holding its breath, and waiting? Do they greet each other, through the gaps between those water molecules which bleach their voices white? In some mother tongue of their own, another whose meaning eludes me? Or do they only shake or nod their heads, without the need for words?
Han started out to write a book about things that are white, apparently. This seemed quickly to lead her to death and horror – I have started to wonder if trauma-narrative isn’t just high literary horror – and to what I’ve seen termed “inherited pain.” Han had an older sister who only lived a couple of hours. Sequences of this book are Han imagining the world seen through her dead sister’s eyes.
her mind turned to thoughts of nebulae. To the thousands of stars like grains of salt whose light had streamed down to her, those nights at her parents’ countryside home. Clean, cold light that had bathed her eyes, scouring her mind of all memory.
It goes in hard and cold. In its own words, “cold and irrevocable.” There is nothing warm or soft in it. Everything in it has a frost-rimed edge.
A lot of it is set during a period Han spent living in Poland as a writing retreat, and I get the sense a European Fimbulwinter didn’t do her much good. It is, however, beautifully written, in a translation by Deborah Smith. (And suddenly I realise how much translated work I read these days.)
Only once does it let hopeful light in.
It is not true that everything is coloured by time and suffering. It is not true that they bring everything to ruin.
It is extraordinarily well done, but it is like living inside a grieving person’s nightmares. And that person is grieving for everything.