Haunted for months by recurring nightmares – images of tides or floods, charred trees serving as tombstones -, swinging between reality and fiction, feeling close to death, a writer reclusive in her apartment in Seoul refines her “farewell letter to the world”. Before, perhaps, as we imagine, ending his life.
It is in this state of mind that Gyeongha, the narrator ofImpossible goodbyes by the Korean novelist Han Kang (winner, with this new book, of the Foreign Medici Prize), receives a cold December morning a text from a friend who asks him to come see her urgently in the hospital.
Inseon, a photographer and ex-documentarian turned cabinetmaker in a small mountainous village on the island of Teju, asks him to urgently take care of his parrot, left alone in his house.
Arriving on the island in the middle of a snowstorm, without luggage and without having thought too much, Gyeongha gets lost in the forest before reaching her friend’s small house and workshop.
On site, noting the death of the bird – a pretext, a symbol -, already haunted by the past, the writer will be overwhelmed by the documentary that her friend had devoted to atrocities committed at the end of the 1940s by the Korean army and militiamen to put down a long “leftist” insurrection: 30,000 dead (10% of the island’s population). A dark page in the modern history of South Korea.
From then on, reality shifts, the earth shakes, and, in the novel, the past and the present will share our attention. “As soon as my consciousness fades, a dream rushes at me,” says Gyeongha.
The next day, alone in this isolated house without water or electricity, she is enveloped in a padded silence. “A house where all night long a tree moves forward, waving its long arms. A house with a dry river on one side, while on the other side is a burned village of tortured people. »
On the continent, this campaign left 200,000 dead. “There was an order from the American military government to prevent communism from gaining ground. » And for this, it goes without saying, to exterminate “the reds”, massacre entire families, burn entire villages.
Then there were other enemies to fight, quickly, across the border, another war. Everything was quickly buried. At the bottom of a mine, under the tarmac of an airport, under the succession of dictatorships. Before memory can express itself again to watch over the ghosts.
Noted with The vegetarian(The Feathered Serpent, 2015, International Booker Prize 2016), in which a woman stopped eating meat, assailed by nightmares of animal massacres, Han Kang, born in 1970, still subtle and empathetic, dialogues with the past and let the ruins speak.
Story of friendship, sensitive exploration of mother-daughter bonds, poetic indictment against forgetting, Impossible goodbyes oscillates throughout between the urgency of the present and a reality too dark to be glimpsed without the filter of dreams.