A book a day: Han Kang: Impossible to say goodbye

In the book that concerns us, and with a beginning that reminds us in part of “the vegetarian”, the protagonist Gyeongha is a woman who feels a certain sense of vertigo before the life she has, reaching the point that after moving she stays locked up two months at home only writing to write, feeling in her meat a loss of muscle mass and malnutrition; A vicious circle of migraines, stomach and analgesic spasms with high contents in caffeine accompany her in a state of physical and psychic imbalance wrapped in moisture and the sweat of the summer days, in which she writes her “authentic goodbye”: her farewell in a kind of will that will leave someone (who has not yet decided) to take care of her relevance when she is in charge of her relevant) It dies, although without getting the expected result in such a company so that one day and another it starts and ends again its farewell letter tries to reach the desired quality. In the midst of this vital lapse, he receives a call from her friend Inseon, a young freelance photographer who met years ago in her first job and with whom she had a great friendship despite the fact that they looked little, who asks her to see her immediately to the hospital where she is admitted; Her request is accompanied by a somewhat particular motive: that she goes home to be able to take care of her bird while she is hospitalized by that cut produced in the workshop where she worked. Inseon a person from whom Gyoongha affirms that “a mere conversation with her and the territories of chaos, ambiguity and uncertainty. His way of speaking and his gestures exudated a firm serenity, he conveyed the confidence that all our actions had a purpose, that all our efforts made a meaning, even if they ended in failure, ”an ancient friendship that now needs it but that his request entails some personal sacrifice. Thus, the story alternates in an interspersed and with brief fragments the trip to the town of Inseon with the memories of when they met.

With this historical episode as a backdrop and that greatly returns us to Han Kang’s literature where narrative mixes with social contexts and that we already saw in her great novel “human acts”, the author draws a story in which he combines a complaint with friendship, dreams with nightmares, reality with fiction in a story in which he alternates the present and the past in an imbricated way where everything is related and In the house they take her to past moments of her life and her people. In this way, the South Korean author combines a dreamlike part that leads us to the eastern literature embodied by Haruki Murakami through memories, thoughts and dreams with the literature of denunciation that showed us in “human acts” and with which he shares a certain theme and focus. Thus, without neglecting the argument based on a background of massacres and war, the war of warmth that surrounds the book shows that they have Kang seem to have put aside its stylistically risky and raw narrative to talk about a tragic story from calm. It should be said that he already showed this warmer approach in “the Greek class”, because in it there was some hardness in the story, although with a clear emotional intention. Therefore, and although it is a good story in which the tone and background balances, it clashes with what one expects from Han Kang at the most visceral and organic level. Here the style is another, here goes warm and backwaters of apparent peace between snowflakes that fall and rest on the story, such as wrapping and calling us to look for shelter, while they draw in the placid fall the rugged land on which to rest full of tombs and corpses. Thus, Han Kang’s initial prose deviates to poetic paths with which he wraps his darkest thoughts, how when he affirms that “next to the piled trunks, which rest like the pieces of the body of a dismembered giant.” This poetic vision of a harsh reality is alternated with semi -critical states in which he affirms, with a contemplative and almost nostalgic look, that “I observe the old woman of profile, motionless as a statue, with both hands resting on her cane (…) I have the strange fear that, at the time when I touched her, her face and her body will disperse in the snow and disappear.”