It was ten years ago, in 2014, that the French public discovered Han Kang, with the translation of The Wind Is Blowing. The novelist was forty-four at the time. Next, we discovered The Vegetarian, the 2016 winner of the Man Booker International Prize, followed by Human Acts and Greek Lessons. However, it was only in 2023, when Éditions Grasset published a translation of Impossibles Adieux (first published in South Korea in 2021) that the great novelist finally gained widespread recognition among French readers and critics. In part this was because it was awarded the Prix Médicis for translated fiction, previous recipients of which include Milan Kundera, Umberto Eco, Philip Roth, Aharon Appelfeld, and Doris Lessing (who would later win the Nobel Prize in Literature). The same work was also shortlisted for the Prix Femina.

     It is with great tenderness, and a sort of all-encompassing poetry palpable on each page, that Han explores the close relationship between two women, the narrator Gyeongha and her friend Inseon, against the backdrop of a tragedy that is little known in France and still unhealed in South Korea. The cruel and bloody incident in question took place on the southern island of Jeju where, before the start of the Korean War, some 30,000 civilians were massacred by the South Korean army and police under the pretence of hunting down communist activists and sympathisers.

     Gyeongha and Inseon first met when Gyeongha was a journalist and Inseon a press photographer, and their friendship has grown stronger over the years. Having withdrawn to her family home on Jeju, Inseon, an only child, requests her friend’s help after losing two fingers in a work accident. It is the middle of winter, and the island is battered by snowstorms. Gyeongha, who suffers from migraines and nightmares, arrives at this remote house, built from stone and wood, to find her friend in a weakened, melancholic, tormented condition, her days brightened only by the presence of her white parrot and her cabinet-making work. With her strength waning, Inseon has even decided to draw up her will.

     Inseon tells her loyal friend about the documentary films she once made (about an old Manchurian woman with Alzheimer’s, or the sexual violence perpetrated by the Korean army in Vietnam), about her superstitious mother, her father’s experience as a political prisoner, her youth, her faded ambitions. She relays her mother’s account of the Jeju massacres, the victims of which included several members of her family, and describes the veil of silence that has fallen over this tragedy ever since. This is what led Inseon to make a documentary on the subject—a sort of inquest in which she faithfully records even the worst acts of violence, together with images of mass graves being unearthed.

     While exploring the labyrinthine depths of both collective and intimate memory (or amnesia), Han also excels in the attention she brings to everyday scenes: a cedar forest, the blustery wind, the colour of the sea, the way the slopes of a mountain resemble an unfolded fan, the smell of old rags, a handful of cranberries, a candle’s flickering flame, the greyish blue of dusk, the voice of a stranger—and the ever-present, dazzlingly white snow, which almost becomes an additional character in the novel, a vital element in this dialogue between two women and between the present and History. In short, Han evokes the beauty of the world, reaching out to it from the other side of this traumatic past and its memories.

     This strange and sometimes disturbing atmosphere, a kind of gentle, muffled space between fantasy and reality, gives rise to all sorts of images and dreams. Indeed, at one point, Gyeongha says that the sight of the swirling snow makes her feel like she has entered a new dimension; she seems to be fascinated by anything that can separate time from space.

     Impossibles Adieux is an entrancing work, one that casts a subtle but hypnotic spell. Though written in a different register, it calls to mind the best novels and writing of Yasunari Kawabata and W.G. Sebald. In its pages we find lessons in comradeship, friendship, an acknowledgement of what is kept and lost between generations, as well as the importance and burden of that transmission—and of love, which can also be a source of ‘terrible pain.’

Translated by Jesse Kirkwood

Thierry Clermont

Author, Long Island, Baby (Stock, 2022)

Literary Critic, Le Figaro littéraire