In June at Matilda Bookshop Book Club, we celebrated our eleventh anniversary of book club (the tenth anniversary passed us by last year, so celebrating the 11th with zeal!), and discussed the intensely poetic masterpiece, We Do Not Part by Nobel Prize laureate, Han Kang. 

The hectic wild weather of this particular Tuesday was a perfect backdrop for a discussion about a book that features weather--particularly snow and storm--so vividly. The novel begins with our narrator being given a near impossible task: to travel to the remote Korean island of Jeju from Seoul to rescue her friend's parrot from starvation during a blizzard. The friend--a filmmaker and woodworking artist--has been hospitalised after a horrific injury in the workshop. But the odyssey to get to the house in Jeju soon becomes a slippage between dreams, nightmares, memory, testimony, the living world and the spirit realm. The narrator, in recalling her friendship & shared artistic practice with her injured friend, finds that she is now tracing the afterburn of massacre--upwards of 30 000 islanders lost their lives just after WW2--and the hauntings are generations deep, scarring the landscape. 

We shared our admiration for the poetic beauty of Kang's writing, while forcing the characters and the reader to not turn away from pain, torture, horror. Kang shows great empathy for humanity, and we understood why she was awarded the Nobel Prize. As a group, we gathered up the main skeins--light & shadow; memory & forgetting; trees & dreams; snow & silence; colour & death; testimony & artmaking; blood & ghosts; bones & nerves; birds & kinship--and used those prompts to unravel the great power of this book. We Do Not Part reveals the interconnection between all things: the living and the dead, and our bodies in the natural world. Our tenth anniversary book chat was deep and inspiring. Thanks to all those who contributed. MOLLY

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If you feel like it, please reply to this email and share your best memory of book club (a book, the discussion, a connection), from over the last eleven years, or since you've been attending/reading alongside with us. We'd love to hear from you.

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Articles, reviews and interviews referenced/mentioned in the June sessions:

We Do Not Part by Han Kang review – a masterpiece from the Nobel laureate by Anne Enright in The Guardian

We Do Not Part by Han Kang review – a harrowing journey into South Korea’s bloody history by Anthony Cummins in The Guardian

South Korea’s Forgotten Anti-Communist Killings by Soobin Kim in The Dial

Han Kang, We Do Not Part Review by Mireille Juchau in The Saturday Paper (sign up for free access)

South Korean author Han Kang wins the 2024 Nobel prize in literature by Ella Creamer in The Guardian

Han Kang's Nobel Prize in Literature Acceptance speech (this is stunning)

Interview with Han Kang: The Nobel Prize 2024

Other books and artists mentioned:

The Vegetarian by Han Kang

The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald (narrator tells another character's story)

When Life Gives You Tangerines (series on Netflix set on the island of Jeju)

Thank you to all the recent newcomers to book club, and of course, our longtermers: you all contribute in making this a dynamic celebration of books and shared reading.

Just beautiful books  |  matildabookshop.com.au