Han Kang is a phenomenal writer, and especially in the wake of current South Korean martial law, this book is deeply impactful and absolutely heartbreaking. Kang writes of death and suffering tenderly yet honestly. By tethering the narrative around the 1980 Gwangju uprising, not only in the moment itself but for over three decades later, and the characters threaded together by Dong-ho as well as their own trauma both tells the story of a nation’s and personal suffering. The theme of violence and the body, how the body’s mutilation affects the soul, what a privilege it is to have a body to live in, is robust, and though the narrative teeters into the spiritual, no answer is provided. The reader, the characters nor Kang knows what all this violence means, only that the soul prevails somehow, in the flame’s wavering outline. 

Some weekend afternoon when the sun drenched scene outside the window seems unusually still and Dong-ho’s profile flits into your mind, mightn’t the thing flickering in front of your eyes be what they call a soul? In the early hours of the morning, when dreams you can’t remember have left your cheeks wet and the contours of that face jolt into an abrupt clarity, mightn’t that wavering be a soul’s emergence? And the place they emerge from, that they waver back into, would it be black as night or dusk’s coarse weave? Dong-ho, Jin-su, the bodies which your own hands washed and dressed, might they be gathered in that place, or are they sundered, several, scattered?