When Korean novelist Han Kang won the Nobel prize in 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 both out at the world – towards the 1980 Gwangju massacre fictionalised in her novel Human Acts – and inward to the human experience, as with The Vegetarian’s portrait of one woman’s claustrophobic struggle.
Much of the appeal of Han’s work is in its mystery, the gaps she leaves for the reader to close. So it is tantalising to have this collection of prose, “a book of reflections” that might illuminate the darker corners of her work.
It is a hope partly fulfilled. Light and Thread – the title from a poem Han wrote at the age of eight – comes in three parts, which we might categorise as writing, poetry and gardening. The title essay, her Nobel laureate lecture, does open up the novels a little. The Vegetarian, about a woman whose progressive rejection of social norms results in her trying to become a plant, was, we learn, inspired by questions such as, “To what depths can we reject violence?” A book for Han is complete “when I reach the end of these questions – which is not the same as when I find answers to them”.
It’s no surprise that Han, haunted by a youthful encounter with a photo book commemorating the victims of the Gwangju massacre, was forced to abandon a “radiant, life-affirming novel” she had been working on and write Human Acts instead. As for Greek Lessons – the story of a mute woman and a man losing his sight, and the most opaque of her novels – the question Han wrestles with tempers dread with hope. “Could it be that by regarding the softest aspects of humanity, by caressing the irrefutable warmth that resides there, we can go on living after all in this brief, violent world?” Sometimes she finds herself weeping as she writes.
It is clear that for Han, writing is a psychic necessity, an impression confirmed when she talks about her most recent novel – arguably her best yet – We Do Not Part. Its feverish state and isolated snowy landscape came from a dream Han experienced: a vision she sought to recreate for the reader. This led to a series of method‑style writing episodes: she would “lie under my desk, curled on my side, to try to experience the interior of a hole in the ground”, or “clench and unclench fistfuls of snow until my hands grow stiff, trying to make sure I’ll remember how it feels”. A dedicated approach, to be sure, even if the sceptical reader might wonder why Han couldn’t simply use her imagination.
If the writing essays are the richest part of the book, the poems that follow are slight and evasive. Meditation on Pain clearly draws on Han’s own experience of chronic pain, but its analogy of a bird in a cage offers far less visceral understanding of her condition than her account in earlier interviews of having such painful joints that she could only type by attaching pens to her fists and hammering the keyboard.
The theme of the final section is Han’s garden: a space she created in a north-facing courtyard of her home, and into which she has directed light with strategically placed mirrors. It’s a task of precise administration. “To distribute the light evenly across every tree, the angle and placement of all eight mirrors must be shifted once every 15 minutes or so.”
The way Han submits her routine to the needs of the plants makes a connection with The Vegetarian, and with the central question she reiterates in the writing essays: “What does it mean to belong to the species named human?” There is beautiful imagery: “When the southerly noon sun slowly passes these mirrors, a patch of light appears on the wall, like a window.” But sometimes a garden is just a garden, and there is some very thin fare here. A declaration such as, “This morning I had the water meter checked and the septic tank cleaned” will not quicken even the keenest reader’s heart, nor will, “I heard that tomorrow, it will rain.”
In her Nobel lecture, Han says that she has not yet completed her next novel. So Light and Thread is a stop gap, for Han as well as her readers. It has moments that remind us of why her work is so important, but the work itself is what we want.
• Light and Thread by Han Kang, translated by Maya West, e yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris, is published by Hamish Hamilton (£12.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
