- Under Japanese occupation until 1945, and then torn apart by the war between America and Russian-supported North Korean communists from 1950-1953, the scars run so deep in so many citizens that the effects are still profoundly felt decades later. Hundreds of thousands of citizens were brutalised and executed by the police and military forces of Japan, America and North Korea.
- Kyungha, a writer, lives alone. She was a former journalist but now she barely survives in a non air-conditioned, dilapidated apartment. She's isolated and lonely, and eats little. Any meaning in her life seems to have evaporated. We soon learn why. She suffers from vivid dreams and nightmares, as well as harsh migraines.
- She has one real friend Inseon, who was a photojournalist and is now a carpenter. She made documentaries, one featuring an old woman who fought the Japanese in the 1940’s, and escaped a shower of bullets. Inseon also lives alone in the island of Jeju, south of the mainland, with only two budgies to keep her company. When Kyungha visits Jeju on her friend's request to look after her surviving budgie for a month she finds the bird dead.
- It's winter and it's constantly snowing and bitterly cold. Snow buries, an apt metaphor for a land of ugly secrets. There are black tree stumps littering the landscape. Also suggestive of the dead.
- This is not an easy novel to read. Structurally, it meanders over time frames, leaving the reader confused, and there's a constant meshing of reality and dreaming. Yet, in a way, this is Kang's point. What is real? Is it the snow, or is it what's underneath? Why hide the ugliness?
- Like Kang's other novels, We Do Not Part (there is so much meaning in that title) is a powerful whack in the stomach. In today's war-torn world it's an awakening.
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