Book name- LIGHT AND THREAD
Author- Han Kang
Published by- Hamish Hamilton, Price- Rs 799
The book opens with Han Kang’s 2024 Nobel lecture, “Light and Thread”, the kernel around which this eponymous, luminous volume is strung. In it, Kang asks questions that stitch themselves into the reader’s mind: “Why is the world so violent and painful? And yet how can the world be this called human?”
The questions posed are at once a philosophical pinprick and a golden filament, conjuring a juxtaposition of paradoxes painted in shades of grief and wonder, absence and presence, disenchantment and delight.
Kang’s vignettes of rumination on whether the living can “save the dead” or the “present help the past” are perhaps coloured by a distinctly Derridean idiom, gesturing toward what Jacques Derrida termed “hauntology”. It is coded into the very fabric of the present, constantly interpolated into the living moment, always already in the process of self-effacement, albeit riddled with the imprints of what once was.
What follows is a body of work that grows on the readers with its incorrigible plurality. The essays constitute the most conceptually expansive dimension of the book while the poems that follow adopt a more elliptical mode and are enveloped in an uncanny affect, reminiscent of the Freudian unheimlich. As Kang puts it, “When I write, I use my body. I use all the sensory details of seeing, of listening, of smelling, of tasting... I try to infuse those vivid descriptions that I feel as a mortal being with blood coursing through her body into my sentences.” The proliferation of personal reflections peppered with poetry, photographs and diary entries is almost epistolary in form with an undertone of stream-of-consciousness interiority. Running over 160 pages, the writing style is distinctly limpid and engaging, reflecting Kang’s signature literary sensibility and finesse. The pages slip through the fingers. They are, at once, ekphrastic and, at times, delightfully disparate, pre-empting any temptation to settle into the comfort of certainty. They leave the reader perpetually hoodwinked by their subtle sleights of perception entrenched in inebriated perambulation. The words appear dipped in muted grief and smouldering outrage, strung together with the thread of contemplation and put up to dry against the light of consciousness.
The precarity of existence is foregrounded in the snippets of diary entries penned with utmost candour. They ooze with a melancholic punctum that lances the reader’s apprehension vis-à-vis the chiaroscuro of lived experience. An air of malaise is dominant in the structuring of sentences and the placement of words. But the lilting lyricality does not belie the jarring rawness beneath.
Kang situates the particularities of South Korean history within the larger currents of world literature. She candidly reflects on the influences shaping her writing process, cursorily tracing how Human Acts, Greek Lessons and The Vegetarian map onto intimate landscapes of vulnerability and endurance; the stories — (re)turning, looping, circling, sometimes stuttering between private consciousness and the public horrors of history — refract the broader sweeping arc of atrocity, most searingly of the egregious Gwangju Uprising. At a time when most writers shy away from addressing the political rhetoric of the past and deliberately distance themselves from incendiary events, Kang chose to pivot from a “radiant, life-affirming novel” she had been working on and, instead, wrote Human Acts, a novel that boldly confronts historical trauma and the human cost of political violence head-on.
In the final section, “North-Facing Garden”, the book finds its apogee. Amid myriad green maple, viburnum, magnolia and a host of other plants, Kang’s careful tending creates a world sans artifice, where sound, scent and sight coalesce, giving rise to an embodied poetics, wherein life flourishes and perhaps finds its fullest expression in stillness. Kang writes, “I never really knew what sunlight was, before I had this garden.” The descriptions are so vividly rendered that the rustle of leaves seems to breathe through the pages per se. Sensory verisimilitude and somatic mimesis are thus conjured up in their truest forms.
The translation of Light and Thread by e. yaewon, Paige Aniyah Morris and Mary West merits special recognition, for it squarely brings the work’s essence to light.
The book closes with a heartbeat in the Epilogue, proffering, “Where is love? It is inside my thump-thumping beating chest. What is love? It is the gold thread connecting between our hearts.” In these final lines, Kang moulds love into a leitmotif, stitching up all ends into a fair resolution, albeit underpinned by a sense of confessional denouement. Apropos of this culmination, in her work, love teeters on a defamiliarised precipice, where signifier and signified collide only to splinter, leaving meaning suspended in the void. Open this book to step into a room of one’s own and follow the ‘gold thread’ into a mind where words stitch the wounds of the world.