Review of Light and String by Han Kang – A Book of Perplexing Meditations | Han Kang

WWhen Korean novelist Han Kang won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2024, the committee praised her “intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life.” In other words, Han’s work looks outward—toward the 1980 Gwangju massacre recounted in her novel Acts of Man—and inward toward the human experience, as with the portrait by Vegan magazine that depicts one woman’s claustrophobic struggle.

Much of the appeal of Hahn’s work lies in its ambiguity, and the gaps she leaves for the reader to fill. So it is exciting to have this collection of prose, a “book of reflections” that might illuminate the dark corners of her work.

It is a hope partially fulfilled. Light and String—the title of a poem Han wrote when he was eight—comes in three parts, which can be classified as writing, poetry, and gardening. The title essay, and her Nobel Prize-winning lecture, opens up the novels a bit. We learn that the novel “The Vegetarian,” about a woman whose gradual rejection of social norms leads to her attempt to become a plant, was inspired by questions like “To what depth can we reject violence?” Hahn’s book is complete “when I reach the end of these questions—which is not the same as when I find the answers to them.”

It is not surprising that Han is haunted by meeting young people With a picture book commemorating the victims of the Gwangju Massacre, she was forced to abandon the “radiant, life-affirming novel” she had been working on and write Human Works instead. As for The Greek Lessons — the story of a mute woman and a man losing his sight, the most mysterious of her novels — it’s a question in which Hahn wrestles with nerves of dread and hope. “Is it possible that by attending to the softer sides of humanity, by caressing the irrefutable warmth that exists there, we can continue to live after all in this short, violent world?” Sometimes she finds herself crying as she writes.

For Han, writing is clearly a psychological necessity, an impression that is confirmed when she talks about her latest novel – arguably her best to date – We Are Inseparable. Her feverish state and isolated snowy landscape came from a dream Han had: a vision she sought to recreate for the reader. This led to a series of stylized writing episodes: she would “lie under my desk, curled up on my side, to try to experience the inside of a hole in the ground”, or “squeeze and open a handful of snow until my hand was stiff, trying to make sure I would remember what it felt like”. This is certainly an ad hoc approach, even if a skeptical reader might wonder why Han couldn’t simply use her imagination.

If the essays are the richest part of the book, the poems that follow are slight and elusive. “Meditating on Pain” clearly draws on Hahn’s own experience with chronic pain, but its analogy of a bird in a cage offers a less in-depth understanding of her condition than what she has recounted in previous interviews about having joints so painful that she could write only by clenching pens in her fists and pounding on the keyboard.

The subject of the final section is Han’s garden: a space she created in her north-facing courtyard, to which she directed light using strategically placed mirrors. It is a task of micromanagement. “To evenly distribute the light to each tree, the angle and position of the eight mirrors must be changed once every 15 minutes or so.”

The way Hahn presents her routine to meet the needs of plants connects with The Vegetarian, and with the central question she repeats in her essays: “What does it mean to belong to the species called human?” There are beautiful images: “When the southern afternoon sun slowly passes over these mirrors, a patch of light appears on the wall, like a window.” But sometimes a garden is just a garden, and there are some very simple things here. An announcement like: “This morning I checked the water meter and cleaned the septic tank” will not warm the heart of even the most careful reader, and neither will “I heard it will rain tomorrow.”

Hahn says in her Nobel Prize lecture that she has not yet completed her next novel. So Light and Thread represents a pause for Hahn as well as for her readers. There are moments that remind us of the importance of her work, but the work itself is what we want.