This is not fiction. This is not even linear non-fiction. Pick up Han Kang’s Light and Thread only if you want to follow her musings and jottings, what attracts her, what ails her. The preoccupations that populate her plots are here in full force, only they are more ponderings than fables. Prose that could be in a pre-story or post-story stage where words brood and feelings… feel.
This small skinny book includes her Nobel Prize speech as well as poems and diary entries. Each page contains her thoughts, and the route her emotions travel—presenting a mood tally, an uneven oscillation between despair and hope. Her painstaking efforts to keep her garden sunlit are somehow connected, to me, to the reversal of a fundamental question she first asks: “Can the living save the dead?” A question she later asks as: “Can the dead save the living?”
All violence everywhere, the senseless wars and power plays between nations, is an open wound. She writes: “How far will the candles travel—the ones lit at the site of every killing, in every time and place laid to waste by unfathomable violence, the ones held by the people who vow never to say goodbye? Will they ride from wick to wick, from heart to heart, on a thread of gold?” Then there is the writer’s revealing of what eager fans can take as writerly secrets. “When I write,” she says, “I use my body.” And it is “the finitude of life/the temporality of existence” that is uppermost on the mind. Her dwellings and curiosities are like a single thread pulling through a fabric. While her book The Vegetarian has been widely celebrated as ecofeminism, and We Do Not Part delves into the 1948 Jeju massacre, Kang has consistently brought South Korean lore and history to the readers in an intense, raw form. Her writing is stark and also brutal.
Light and Thread stands apart as an inward gaze, a searchlight into the backstory. Because it circumvents a straight narration and mixes genres as it goes along, it might be an uneven read for some. Those who want their books to have a traditional structure will be baffled by the wisdom and angst coming their way. The words carry profundity and philosophy, but they are also cutaway and abrupt now and then, sans segue.
Ultimately a book about hope, Light and Thread is all heart. As if careful planning of plot and structure would disrupt the authenticity and vulnerability, a vulnerability Kang is never afraid to display. To speak of a world which is at once beautiful and tragic with a kind of tremor is perhaps Kang’s achievement here.
Within these pages is an artless confiding, a tenuous relationship with the reader that the author establishes. For anyone seeking a post-script to all her award-winning works, this is the perfect companion piece. Read it to get her. Even though she says: If I am nothing more than me / I cannot meet you / If you are nothing more than you / You cannot meet me.