Han Kang and Amélie Cordonnier: books not to be missed

Impossible goodbyes

By Han Kang, trans. from Korean by Khyngran Choi and Pierre Bisiou.

Grasset, 336 p., €22.

L’Express rating: 4/5

Maybe we should never hide books from children? Intrigued by a book hidden in the family library, 12-year-old Han Kang grabs it and discovers, horrified, a series of swollen faces and mutilated bodies, testimonies of a massacre that occurred in Gwangju in May 1980. Three years earlier, a few months before the tragedy, his family had left this large city in southern Korea to settle in Seoul. Since then, survivor’s guilt has plagued his father, Han Seung-won, a renowned writer. And it didn’t take long to pursue his daughter. “That day, I lost a little confidence in man,” reveals Han Kang. Years later, in 2014, she wrote a novel, The one who returns, to this student and union uprising duly repressed by the military junta. Gyeongha, the narrator of her new and captivating fiction, Impossible goodbyes, also wrote a book on Gwangju. And she too is beset by nightmares when the story begins. Before experiencing a few more…

The contrast is striking: it is difficult to imagine that behind this thin voice and this youthful face framed by long black hair hides such a powerful and singular novelist, considered as the major figure of the new South Korean literary generation and this , in particular, since the International Booker Prize 2016 for its Vegetarian. A consecration, which, she confides, did not change much in her life, other than expanding the number of her readers. “I was 46 years old and already more than twenty years of writing…” If Han Kang seems impervious to honors, she is less impervious to human abuses. It was in 1996, during a stay on the island of Jeju, an hour by plane from Seoul, that she experienced her second confrontation with absolute evil. Another massacre, another taboo, which will only begin to be lifted with the election of the first civilian president, in 1983. Jeju Island? For newlyweds from the continent, a heavenly place, ideal for honeymoons; for the islanders, a painful place of memory. Thirty thousand people, presumed “rebels”, men, women, grandparents, children, were exterminated there in 1948 by the nationalist government. “As a young journalist, I came for a walk, to get a breath of fresh air, and I came across a lady, a widow, who told me her story. Then I documented the shock. Most of the victims were pseudo-communists, but it’s ridiculous, many of them didn’t even know what communism meant.”

When she arrives on the island, her heroine, Gyeongha, knows bits of this painful past. Her friend, Inseon, a native of Jeju, told her how her mother, then a child, had escaped the massacre in her village. It is to save Inseon’s parrot, hospitalized, that she goes there, in the middle of winter, when a snowstorm is coming. The journey is daunting: thick fog, ghostly landscape, sluggish bus, perilous junctions… Gyeongha arrives too late, the parrot is dead. Failing to save a life, the narrator discovers, in her friend’s house, archives and files compiled on the extent of the massacre. Between dream and reality, fantasy and reminiscences, fantasy and realism, the boundaries are blurred. We then let ourselves be carried away by the author’s pen into a third dimension, a dazzling in-between, where past and present intertwine, family and collective memories respond to each other. And always, the snow, and this white, the color of mourning, which overwhelms us… Marianne Payot

On guard

by Amélie Cordonnier.

Flammarion, 233 P., €20.

L’Express rating: 3/5

Onslaughts of verbal violence (To slice)the impossibility of loving your child (A wolf somewhere)the end of desire (Not this evening) : in three novels, Amélie Cordonnier has become a master in the art of the closed family, unearthing what remains hidden in the privacy of homes. A more original enterprise than it seems as the author ventures beyond consensual considerations, driven by a nervous style which gives her books a particular urgency. Here she continues to plow her furrow with a domestic thriller that blurs the lines between fiction and reality. Because, warns Amélie Cordonnier in the prologue, this story “will not be autofiction, it will be vivisection”. It all begins with a letter from child protection summoning the narrator to an appointment. Initially believing it to be a bad joke, she finally understands that an anonymous report of mistreatment has been made. As the procedure gets carried away, the heroine and her family find themselves caught in a nightmarish vice that would make any parent turn pale with anxiety.

Everyone will be able to identify with this mother who loves her children dearly but sometimes gets angry when doing homework, ensures that their meals are balanced but gives in on Nutella, doesn’t necessarily wash the duvet covers every week and yes, during confinement, a slap was sent in response to an insult from a teenager deprived of his cell phone. The matter is settled, there is not a shadow of abuse in this family. But how do we demonstrate that we are good parents? We devour this book while waiting for the end of the torture, we hope, we despair and we are indignant. Pauline Leduc