by Cathryn Conroy (Dublin, Ohio): “I feel as if I’ve opened the door to a dream within a dream and stepped inside,” says the main character, Kyungha, near the end of this profound, disturbing, and harrowing novel by Han Kang, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2024, the first Asian woman and the first South Korean to receive this honor. This sentence in the book perfectly describes my feeling as a reader of this book: I opened the door to a dream within a dream. And it was a bit fevered as well.
It’s a cold winter morning in Seoul when Kyungha receives an urgent and cryptic message from her dear friend Inseon to come immediately. But Inseon lives on Jeju Island. Kyungha soon realizes that Inseon is in Seoul in a hospital, and the situation is dire. Inseon asks Kyungha to travel to Jeju Island immediately to save the life of her pet bird, who has already been without food or water for several days. The journey—by air, bus, and foot—is treacherous due to a massive snowstorm that makes travel nearly impossible. Barely alive, Kyungha finally arrives at Inseon’s remote home on the island. What she finds there is a dead bird and in her fevered state she experiences that horrifying dream within a dream…or is it all real?
The haunting subtext of the novel—the dream that is really a nightmare of the worst kind—is a recounting in quite (gory) detail of the 1948 massacre of 30,000 civilians on Jeju Island by anti-communist troops. The innocent civilians—from infants to the elderly—were forced out of their homes and summarily shot; their bodies were shoved into the ocean or hidden in a cobalt mine or buried in the ground under what later became a runway at the Jeju Island airport. This novel tells about those atrocities from the point of view of one family and all they suffered and then kept secret for decades. It is very difficult and grueling reading, but a vital part of hidden history. And as horrific as it is, this is a story that needs to be told.
But most of all, this is a novel about human endurance, the power of a deep, abiding friendship, and a salute to the inner meaning of our fragile and precarious lives. Filled with imagery and symbolism, this is a book that begins with horror but ends with hope.
When I first started this book, I fully intended to read it quickly. It’s not that long, after all. But I soon realized that this is a book best read in small parts—a little each day. It’s just too intense for more than that. It’s the stuff of nightmares, if you’re not careful about the time of day you read it. But don’t let that scare you off. This is such an important and vital book to the literary canon. It tells the story of things others would like us to not remember or never know happened.
