“Lying on her side with her dead daughter on her chest, she felt her daughter slowly cooling. Then she had no more tears.” It’s a white book, with a sincere and far from banal title; skimming the table of contents, you’ll find yourself thinking: snow, fog, and so on. You’re probably thinking of a simple book, imbued with the purity to which Korean literature, and specifically Han Kang’s, has become somewhat accustomed. We’re faced with...
“FRIDAY RE-VERSO” “Why did the seasons continue to follow one another for me, while for him time has stopped forever in that May?” In our minds, as we close the book with a closed throat, mortified by a memory that is now ours too, the echo of the literature professor’s voice when he explained to us the greatness of Primo Levi’s writing: he added nothing, because there was nothing to add. The title itself is an...
“The chalk breaks in two and both halves fall to the ground.” In a modern Seoul, where communication runs on all channels, the world of a woman suffering from mutism resulting from a series of traumas comes into contact with that of a man blinded by a degenerative disease. Two sensorial voids that will also reveal themselves to be two internal voids, linked to open wounds that they cannot heal, and which at the slightest...
