Set in Seoul, the book moves between two unnamed characters, a man and a woman both struggling against the loss of language. Equally wonderful and terrible, both insufficient to human purposes and too powerful to tame, it becomes a character itself, a force that must be confronted. But while Han’s other three translated books are governed by failures of communication, this novel gives language a much more active role. The fourth of Han’s novels to reach English-speaking readers, Greek Lessons (translated by Deborah Smith, who translated Han’s other works that appear in English, and Emily Yae Won) seems at first like it may be no different.

The Vegetarian, about a woman whose seemingly simple decision to stop eating meat evolves into a protest against being human, takes a slightly different tack, introducing us to living characters who are blankly inaccessible to one another, each contained in the cell-like spaces of belief, trauma, fantasy, and selfishness that they variously occupy. The White Book also extends a hand to the dead, as the narrator addresses her mother’s firstborn daughter, who lived only a few hours, imagining a world in which the infant heard her mother’s desperate command-“ Don’t die. Here, the living long to speak with the dead and the dead with the living, but the divide is uncrossable. Human Acts takes place during and after the 1980 Gwangju Uprising, during which hundreds, possibly thousands, of students and other civilians protesting the coup d’état that installed the dictator Chun Doo-hwan were killed by the South Korean military. The reader, like the characters themselves, experiences a loneliness so profound that it verges on physical sensation: a wrenching desire to mend these broken connections. Characters cut off from communication-by death, by time, by life’s other cruelties-often address unreachable interlocutors, struggling to be heard, yet only Han’s reader is there to listen. All three books stage conversations hauntingly out of joint, severed dialogues that yearn toward impossible completion. What does it mean to speak without the hope of a response? To address someone who cannot or will not hear you, who cannot or will not reply? The first three full-length novels by the South Korean writer Han Kang to appear in English pose these questions with an uncompromising starkness.

Death in her hands novel