Anne Enright in The Guardian:
There are books in a writer’s life that gather all their previous themes and explorations in a great act of creative culmination, which both surpasses what had gone before and makes it more clear. We Do Not Part is one of those books. Published last year in Swedish translation, it helped to secure Korean writer Han Kang the 2024 Nobel prize in literature.
Those who know Han’s work will recognise previous themes and methods here. Like the eponymous character in The Vegetarian, the narrator of We Do Not Part, Kyungha, is fragile and resilient. She finds it hard to sleep or eat, suffers from summer heat and winter cold, and endures terrible physical suffering for reasons that can be hard to understand. Both stories feature video artists, sisterly bonds, and nightmares of murder and bloodshed set in Korean woodlands.
There are structural similarities, too. The Vegetarian (whose three distinct sections were originally published separately) moves from one to another point of view around the central, finally starving, figure of Yeong-hye. In We Do Not Part, each section gives way to something that feels stylistically very different, though there is only one narrator and the action takes place over the course of a few days.
More here.
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