‘I’m Not Saying Goodbye’, a new novel by Nobel Prize winner Han Kang is coming soon

In the next few weeks Adelphi will publish, with the translation by Lia Iovenitti, “I don’t say goodbye”, a new novel by the South Korean writer Han Kang, Nobel Prize winner for Literature 2024. The novels ” La vegetariana” (2016), “Attihumana” (2017), “Convalescence” (2019) and “L’ora di Greco” (2023).

Appearing in 2021 “I Don’t Say Goodbye” – which in France received the Prix Médicis étranger 2023 and the Prix Émile Guimet 2024 – is Han Kang’s eighth novel. It is a sort of arduous and painful winter journey that the protagonist, Gyeong-ha, makes when, without hesitation, she accepts the pressing request of her friend Inseon, hospitalized in Seoul, to go to the island of Jeju to give to drink for his budgie, who is left alone and risks dying. In Jeju, in fact, a terrible snowstorm welcomes her, and then a path in the dark where she gets lost, falls and injures herself. But nothing can stop her. Gyeong-ha gets up and continues, because he knows he absolutely must reach Inseon’s house and save the parrot. When he arrives, he will only be able to bury it, digging with difficulty in the snow and frozen earth. Shortly afterwards, however, she will see him fluttering in the dark and cold rooms again – and her friend, who she had left at the hospital, will also appear with him.

Under his guidance, Gyeong-ha will make another journey: a descent into hell, this time, into the history of Inseon’s family and one of the most infamous massacres Korea has ever known – the one perpetrated between the end of 1948 and early months of 1949, against thirty thousand civilians accused of being communists. And the reader, in turn, will only be able to let himself be guided by Han Kang’s narrative virtuosity, by his writing that is both lyrical and implacably precise, in the dreamlike and memorial itinerary of Gyeong-ha, where the border between visible and invisible seems vanish. But the atrocious reality of violence cannot disappear.