A Novel in Which Language Hits Its Limit—And Keeps On Going

What does it mean to speak without the hope of a response? To address someone who cannot or will not hear you, who cannot or will not reply? The first three full-length novels by the South Korean writer Han Kang to appear in English pose these questions with an uncompromising starkness. All three books stage conversations hauntingly out of joint, severed dialogues that yearn toward impossible completion. Characters cut off from communication—by death, by time, by life’s other cruelties—often address unreachable interlocutors, struggling to be heard, yet only Han’s reader is there to listen. The reader, like the characters themselves, experiences a loneliness so profound that it verges on physical sensation: a wrenching desire to mend these broken connections.

takes place during and after the 1980 Gwangju Uprising, during which hundreds, possibly thousands, of students and other civilians protesting the coup d’état that installed the dictator Chun Doo-hwan were killed by the South Korean military. also extends a hand to the dead, as the narrator addresses her mother’s firstborn daughter, who lived only a few hours, imagining a world in which the infant heard her mother’s desperate command—“”—and survived. , about a woman whose seemingly simple decision to stop eating meat evolves into a protest against being human, takes a slightly different tack, introducing us to living characters who are blankly inaccessible to one another, each contained in the cell-like spaces of belief, trauma, fantasy, and selfishness that they variously occupy.