Everything I have ever experienced is made crystalline

On days of heavy snowfall, I used to extend my coat sleeve to watch the flakes settle on the fluff on its dark fabric and dissolve. It make me dizzy to consider the innumerable combinations of coruscating hexagonal crystals like the ones I'd seen in the book that made up each grain of snow. For days after, I had woken from sleep and, while my eyes remained closed, imagined it was still snowing outside. I had seen snow drift down around me indoors while I lay sprawled on the floor, working on some tedious holiday assignment. Flakes landing on my hand, from which I'd just removed a hangnail. Flakes landing on the loose hairs and eraser dust strewn across the floor.

The strangest thing, snow, I recall Inseon saying. Had she been picturing scenes similar to the ones I'd imagined? How does something like that fall from the sky? she's said, eyes directed not at me but at the window, as though she were quietly disputing someone outside, someone invisible. As though she found it difficult to accept its beauty.

We Do Not Part, by Han Kang, is a haunting novel, lyrical, dreamlike. Lulled by its beauty, I was blindsided by its grimness. Nightmare-like.

The novel centres on events concerning the inhabitants of Jeju Island and the massacres beginning in April 1948 and continuing through 1949. the military hunted and killed residents, including children and infants. The ruling government body at the time? The United States Army Military Government in Korea (USAMGIK), and then Syngman Rhee elected as the first president of the Republic of Korea (having previously served as president of the Korean Provisional Government, until he was impeached; see Ed Park's Same Bed, Different Dreams), who escalated the eradication of "rebel forces." 

On days when American reconnaissance planes dropped a blizzard of propaganda leaflets, leaflets that said anyone who turned themself in wouldn't be punished, my aunt would whisper to my mom that he might give himself up after reading the message. That since he was slight and looked younger than his age, he probably wouldn't be shot on his way down from the woods. 

This story is another chapter in the seemingly eternal battle between the hero Americans and the godless commie Russians (as the story has been framed for us westerners). I am stunned that the reviews are not directly addressing the subject matter of this novel and recognizing it as an indictment of American hegemony and interventionist politics.

She would recount what my father had told her about the torture he's endured at thte alcohol factory. How a man in a miltary uniform with no insignia who spoke the northern dialect had treated him. What the man said each time he stripped my father and tied him upside down to a chair. 

We'll slaughter every last one of you commie sons of bitches, wipe you clean off the face of the earth. We'll stamp the life out of you rats if there's even a drop of red in you.

Some estimates of the dead on Jeju number as high as 80,000. 

It's no coincidence that some thirty thousand people were killed on this island that winter, and another two hundred thousand were murdered on the mainland the next summer. The governing U.S. military ordered that everyone on the island, all roughly three hundred thousand people, be wiped out if that's what it took to stop their communization.

It wasn't until 2003 that the South Korean government issued an apology, and 2019 that the police forces and defense ministry acknowledged their role. The United States government has been called to apologize for its role in the incident, but has yet to do so.

In the four years between the first time I had the dream and that early summer morning, I had parted ways with several people in my life. Some of these partings had been by choice, while others had caught me entirely unawares; I'd fought the latter with everything I had. If, as various ancient faiths say, there exists in a celestial realm or a netherworld an immense mirror that observes and logs everyone's movements, I'm sure the last three to four years of my life as recorded there must resemble a snail coming out of its shell to push along a knife's edge. A body desiring to live. A body pricked and nicked. A body spurning, embracing, clinging. A body kneeling. A body entreating. A body seeping blood or pus or tears.

I take the title to mean the dead never leave us, history haunts us, our family haunts us. Even the pet bird leaves traces. We are mired in the lives of the dead.

There's a great deal of ambiguity regarding the present day circumstances of the novel. Is the narrator's journey to Jeju real? Does she die in the snow? Is all of it a dream? How does her friend materialize here, she is in a hospital in Seoul, has she crossed to another realm? Is the bird resurrected?

Kang's descriptions of snow are otherworldly. I wish I'd read this a couple of months ago when we were still blanketed in white instead of during the spring rains. The snow here also serves many literary purposes: it hides and protects, it numbs, it purifies, it preserves.

Yes, this is a powerful book, with cinematic prose and highly metaphorical imagery. But honestly, can we just express some outrage about the fucking atrocity, and how the fucking United States persists in interfering: Haiti, Vietnam, Cuba, Panama, Iraq, Iran, Venezuela, and literally dozens of other countries to varying degrees. Could they just fucking stop?!

Each time I am lured into sleep like I'm being pulled toward a warm light, I force my eyes open with my hands. I can't tell if it's drowsiness or the thin layer of ice over my lashes that is keeping them sealed.

Faces appear to me in my fading consciousness. Not the faces of dead strangers but of people who are living, albeit far away on the mainland. They are exhilaratingly clear. Vivid memories play out before me. In no particular order, and without context. Like a thousand dancers spilling onto the stage at once to each perform a different movement. Their bodies, suspended in their poses, shimmer like crystals. 

I don't know if this is what happens right before you die. Everything I have ever experienced is made crystalline. Nothing hurts anymore. Hundreds upon thousands of moments glitter in unison, like snowflakes whose elaborate shapes are in full view. How this is possible, I can't say. My every pain and joy, all my deep-rooted sorrows and loves, shine, not as an amalgam but as a whole comprised of distinct singularities, glowing together as one giant nebula.

Excerpt: Crystals

A density of sentences

Anyway, routine returns.

Every day I read one book of poetry and one novel to be recharged by a density of sentences. I stretch and strength-train and walk for two hours a day so I can sit at my desk again for long periods of time.

Light and Thread, by Han Kang, is a short book of nonfiction that includes her Nobel lecture, as well as poems, images, reflections, and journal entries — meditations on writing, on living while writing, or not writing. (The spareness of it calls to mind The White Book.) 

For someone familiar with Kang's novels, these snippets speak to how she fully embodies her writing: she researches deeply, thinks deeply, feels deeply. 

My favourite section is "North-Facing Garden," in which Kang describes her plot of land, and the subsequent journal documenting her struggle with to plant up and maintain a garden 180 centimetres long by 40 centimetres wide. 

The biggest challenge is to maximize light — she uses mirrors to ensure the light falls on all sides equally.

While in itself the garden diary is not of great literary value, it manifests practicality and calm. Every aspect reflects an author who acts with mindfulness and intention.

I am inspired to tend my own garden — observe it, document it, learn how to nurture it. I've had four years here to begin to know the rhythm of the light, and watch how the snails, birds, squirrels move through this patch of the ruelle verte. The construction next door will be complete this summer, and then the vehicles and debris will be cleared out. I'll take stock: one lilac tree destroyed, but one left standing; a raspberry bush trampled; I'll cut back the grape vine. And then, then I can sow the seeds of what is yet to bloom.

Excerpt

No matter how small a garden, it's still a garden, so it will require a good deal of tending.

An infinitely more physical way to touch

There was no touch as instantaneous and intuitive as the gaze. It was close to being the only way of touching without touch.

Language, by comparison, is an infinitely more physical way to touch. It moves lungs and throat and tongue and lips, it vibrates the air as it wings its way to the listener. The tongue grows dry, saliva spatters, the lips crack. 

Why does one thing resonate when another leaves me cold? Greek Lessons, by Han Kang, is an exquisite thing.

The first thing I perceive is time. I sense it as a slow, cruel current of enormous mass passing constantly through my body to gradually overcome me.

Why do I love this book? Maybe because it is about language. Maybe because it is about beauty, and favours the ephemeral over the eternal, turning Plato inside out. Maybe because it is cosmopolitan and urban, but intimate and quotidian. It reminds me of being in Greece. It reminds me of learning German. It reminds me of now. It makes me want to write. It makes me want to sculpt. It makes me cry. It puzzles me, how it unfurls.

Maybe because I read (most of) it on a plane. A friend of mine claims watching movies on a plane is a more intensely emotional experience, and I keep meaning to google this allegation, ascertain its science. Maybe it’s the same for books, only there are books I recall reading in flight that were less memorable, or at least memorably not enjoyable (which perhaps proves the point?). Maybe because I’m so high above the ground, I have a god's eye view, a richer appreciation of the earthly. (It turns out it's the air pressure, lower oxygen levels in the brain.)

I want to forgive this book everything. At about halfway (days ago, while still earthbound, nursing my ailing mother) I felt confused, but also swept away. I wanted to make sure, really sure, I understood everything, so I started over.

I want to read it again now.

He teaches Ancient Greek and is going blind. He pines for his first love, when his family lived in Germany; he regrets how rebuffed another friend. 

She is unable to speak, a response to trauma, not for the first time in her life. She's mourning her mother, but perhaps also grieving her own life. Divorced, she's lost custody of her son.  

How can these two people break through their isolation and connect?

I will for a few days come back to the thought that maybe I should study Ancient Greek (or some similarly inconsequential language), or that I should be crafting poetry. I expect this impulse will fade entirely within the week, but part of me hopes it doesn't.

I think about the lovely turns of phrase I’d like to borrow, to use as titles for sculptures I’ve yet to mould: "My eyelids quiver like stridulating insect wings." (The sensation he feels repeats her earlier state of being. "The woman’s eyelids tremble. Like insects’ wings rubbing briskly together.") "I will see the fabric of darkness, unraveled into bluish threads, wind about the city." "The latter part of his life began, which could not be called anything but a chaotic mess."

Now and then, words would thrust their way into her sleep like skewers, startling her awake several times a night. She got less and less sleep, was increasingly overwhelmed by sensory stimuli, and sometimes an inexplicable pain burned against her solar plexus like a metal brand. 

The most agonizing thing was how horrifyingly distinct the words sounded when she opened her mouth and pushed them out one by one. Even the most nondescript phrase outlined completeness and incompleteness, truth and lies, beauty and ugliness, with the cold clarity of ice. Spun out white as spider's silk from her tongue and by her hand, those sentences were shameful. She wanted to vomit. She wanted to scream.

There is clay, and there is touch throughout this book (and the colour blue). "Her face is thin and drawn, like the elongated features of certain clay sculptures." Touchpoints for me. "The flesh remembers." "A brighter and more concentrated stillness filled the dark clay jar of her body."

The sadness of the human body. The human body, with its many indented, tender, vulnerable parts. The forearms. The armpits. The chest. The groin. A body born to embrace someone, to desire to embrace someone.

We are earthy, and earthly. Everything we do or say has physicality. Language is physical. This physicality that Kang emphasizes makes everything sensual.

She no longer thought in language. She moved without language and understood without language — as it had been before she learned to speak, no, before she had obtained life, silence, absorbing the flow of time like balls of cotton, enveloper her body both outside and in.

The man across the aisle is playing chess. I am sad that I have no one to play chess with, or backgammon. This week I wondered if I could teach my mother to play backgammon, and then I rejected the idea. I consider playing chess online, at least it will exercise my thinking, my logic, my projection into the future, more than my daily sudoku anyway. I think about whether I prefer the blue labyrinth of the UK cover or the hexagonal pencil in cross section of the North American cover.

("She just didn't like taking up space. Everyone occupies a certain amount of physical space according to their body mass, but voice travels far beyond that. She had no wish to disseminate her self.")

Sometimes she thinks of herself as more like some form of substance, a moving solid or liquid, than like a person. When she eats hot rice, she feels that she herself becomes that rice, and when she washes her face with cold water there is no distinction between her and that water. At the same time she knows that she is neither rice nor water, but some harsh, solid substance that will never commingle with any being, living or otherwise.

Excerpt.
"The Middle Voice"

Inviolate to the ravages of time

Is it because of some billowing whiteness within us, unsullied, inviolate, that our encounters with objects so pristine never fail to leave us moved?

The White Book, by Han Kang, is a difficult book to talk about. It's billed as fiction, but it reads like something between memoir and poetry. It's less book than art. Being so experimental in form, it is difficult to synthesize.

I read it about a month ago, in one sitting. I promptly forgot its details, but the mood of it washed over me and lingered. I revisited portions of it last week in preparation for book club discussion, but again the substance of it has washed away.

It's a beautiful book as object. It's crisp, stark. French flaps. White space. Blank pages. Black and white photos (greyscale, really).

On the whole it leaves me cold (like frost). It's sterile and antiseptic (like salt).

It starts off as a formal exercise, a list of white things. I expect a meditation on whiteness and its associations (a philosophical inquiry à la William H Gass). I am relieved that there is no discussion of race, but other bookclub participants are outraged that there is no discussion of race; how could anyone call their book "The White Book" and not at least acknowledge the issue of race?

The narrator walks through a foreign city. The city is never named. The very first review of this book that I read identified the city; in fact this knowledge piqued my interest in the book. It's a city that I know, and that I don't particularly like. I wonder if I would've been able to identify the city without having been told. I think so. It's a city that was destroyed and rebuilt. It looks old, but it's brand new. It feels... disconnected.

The story, such as it is, is about the narrator's older sister, whom she never met. (Or it is about her relationship with her older sister.) The baby had lived only an hour or so. The heart and soul of the book is the narrator's imagining of her non-sister's non-life. It is a life reconstructed, resurrected; but it's not the real thing. Her sister is a kind of ghost, realized in this city of ghosts.

Whiteness tends toward innocence, purity, peace, and hope. Also blankness, a kind of neutrality. White is all colour.

The narrator has migraines. So do I. I was the only one in our discussion group who has migraines. Statistically, I thought there'd be one more. "I concentrate on simply enduring the pain, sensing time's discrete drops as razor-sharp gemstones, grazing my fingertips." White pain, like white noise.

Clean, cold light that had bathed her eyes, scouring her mind of all memory.

The book's whiteness is punctuated with colour: a bead of blood, red brick wall, black earth's reflection, the blue tinge of a sluggish dawn, a gunmetal sea.

Fog: "can we really call it white? That vast soundless ululation between this world and the next, each cold water molecule formed of drenched black darkness." Is translucence white?
Blizzard: "This vanishing fragility, this oppressive weight of beauty."
Bed linen: "Your sleep is clean, and the fact of your living is nothing to be ashamed of."
Laughing whitely: "Laughter that is faint, cheerless, its cleanness easily shattered. And the face that forms it."
Bones: "That human beings are also constructed of something other than flesh and muscle seemed to her like a strange stroke of luck."

This book will not advance your understanding of whiteness. It may or may not have achieved any resolution of memory, or guilt, or writer's block.

The end inspires some hopefulness, that all will be whiteness (all will be all colours?), that the narrator will see clearly with her non-sister's eyes. It confirms connection through detachment.

This book is not a story, it's an experience.

Reviews
Asian Review of Books
The Irish Times

There are certain memories which remain inviolate to the ravages of time. And to those of suffering. It is not true that everything is coloured by time and suffering. It is not true that they bring everything to ruin.

The impossibility of forever

Incandescent bulb

Her desk had been swept bare. There is only the incandescent bulb above it, giving off light and heat.
All is still.
The blind has not been lowered, and headlights can be seen moving along the main road at sporadic intervals now that midnight has passed.

She is sitting at the desk, like someone who has never known suffering.
Not like someone who has just been crying, or is about to.
Like someone who has never shattered.
As though there has never been a time when the only comfort lay in the impossibility of forever.

— from The White Book, by Han Kang.

A border area between states of being

"The water's boiling." Her voice had no weight to it, like feathers. It was neither gloomy nor absent-minded, as might be expected of someone who was ill. But it wasn't bright or light-hearted either. It was the quiet tone of a person who didn't belong anywhere, someone who had passed into a border area between states of being.

The Vegetarian, by Han Kang, is a creepy little novel, in the most beautiful way. It's completely weird and fascinating. I love this book.

Despite having read quite a few reviews of it, none of them quite prepared me. Maybe, since I was already interested in reading it, I merely skimmed the reviews in order to avoid spoilers. Basically I had the impression that this was a book about a dinner party gone wrong. (I love dinner parties! I love when they go wrong!) There is indeed a dinner party, and it does go wrong. And then there's a family dinner that goes so much more wrong. But there's more to this story than what is served and what is eaten.

Yeong-Hye turns to vegetarianism because of a dream (a horrific dream, all the more terrifying for being only vaguely described for the reader). She will not even touch mayonnaise, and later eschews food altogether. She wants to photosynthesize; she wants to be a tree.

She posits also that it's the trees' hands digging into the earth (heads buried?), their legs flailing above, crotches flowering.

The novel is in three acts, from the perspectives of her husband, her brother-in-law, and her sister. Yeong-hye turns vegetarian, her family stages an intervention, she's hospitalized; she's released, there's an interlude of peace, but not exactly normalcy, that gives way to art, maybe some kind of understanding, sublimation, acceptance; she's institutionalized.

Yeong-hye's vegetarianism is not symptomatic of anorexia. It's not about control. Despite being shackled by domesticity and refusing (or forgetting) to wear a bra (it's just not comfortable), it's not about feminism. Her actions do not have any religious motivation.

A review in the New York Times calls out some of these readings — feminist, ethnographic, sociological — as not exactly faulty or skewed but incomplete or incapable.

I don't think any isms explain Yeong-hye's behavior. Some things defy explanation. Some things cannot be explained in words. Some things can only be expressed through art.

Yeong-hye's brother-in-law is an artist. He had a vision, an artistic vision he had trouble realizing.

His silence had the heavy mass of rock and the tenacious resistance of rubber, particularly when his art wasn't going well.

Yeong-hye's sister (the artist's wife) also has dream. She tried acting on a version of it once.

The reason for these things is beyond words. Wounded bodies, strained souls.

It is somewhat mystifying that the plantlike and the animal are sometimes confounded. Of course, what joins them is their nonhumanness. Plantlike should not be taken for passive; it is persistent.

The trees by the side of the road are blazing green fire undulating like the rippling flanks of a massive animal, wild and savage.

Genesis

A poet's proclamation, "I believe that humans should be plants," was the seed of this story, but I wonder if Kang didn't then investigate the several cult-like philosophies whereby it is believed the human body can derive all its energy and nourishment via the photosynthesis of sunlight.

In a beautiful instance of synchronicity, my cursory Wikipedia research takes me from sungazing to Joseph Plateau, whose father was a talented flower painter, an entirely random yet meaningful fact.

Related concepts
Two documentaries:
Sungazing: Eat the Sun
Breatharianism: In the Beginning There Was Light

Two books come to mind, related obliquely, but which may appeal to readers who liked The Vegetarian:
The Art of Murder, by José Carlos Somoza, insofar as it relates to the human body as a canvas.
The Beauty, by Aliya Whiteley, where fungal disease takes humanoid form, kind of.

Two sources:
Excerpt of The Vegetarian [Words without Borders].
"The Fruit of My Woman" — the short story from which this novella grew [Granta].