‘I’m not saying goodbye’, a journey into the abyss of Han Kang’s memory

Less than a month after winning the most coveted award for a writer, the Nobel Prize for Literature, Adelphi publishes a novel unpublished in Italy by Han Kang, ‘I don’t say goodbye’ (Fabula series – translated by Lia Iovenitti, pages 265; price 20 euros), in stores from November 5th. ‘I Don’t Say Goodbye’ is the eighth novel by the South Korean writer born in 1970 and who became famous after obtaining the Man Booker International Prize in 2016 for ‘La vegetariana’, published in Italy by Adelphi in 2016.

The same publishing house also published Han Kang ‘Human Acts’ (2017), ‘Convalescence’ (2019) and ‘L’ora di Greco’ (2023). Released in 2021, it is an arduous and painful winter journey into the most tragic memory of her country, undertaken by the protagonist Gyeong-ha at the request of a friend stuck in a hospital bed who begs her to go to the island of Jeju to giving water to his budgie who risks dying because he is left alone.

Gyeong-ha rushes to catch the first plane to go and save him. In Jeju, however, she is greeted by a terrible snowstorm and then a path in the darkness where she gets lost, falls and injures herself. It is the beginning of a descent into hell, in the abyss of one of the most atrocious massacres that Korea has ever known: thirty thousand civilians killed and many others imprisoned and tortured, between the end of 1948 and the beginning of 1949. A never healed wound that continues to torment the two friends, just like he had tormented In-seon’s mother, a direct victim of that crime.

Three women, united by the invisible thread of memory, who with determination refuse to forget, to say goodbye and sever the bond with those who are no longer there. With his writing that is both lyrical and implacably precise, made up of “instants frozen in flight that shine like crystals”, Han Kang manages to tell this dark page of history, not only Korean, delivering to the reader a painful, lucid and poetic novel where the border between dream and reality, between visible and invisible fades to the point of almost vanishing. A novel that she herself defined as “a candle lit in the depths of the human soul”.

‘I’m Not Saying Goodbye’ is a book that Han Kong started writing in 2014. Just two pages. Then, in 2018, the rest of the novel. “A few years ago, someone asked me what the theme of my next book would be and I remember answering that I hoped it would be love – explains the author in the final notes – I still think so. I want to believe that this is a book about extreme love”.