by Han Kang (Translated by Maya West, e. yaewon & Paige Aniyah Morris)
With profound spaciousness, Light and Thread offers Han’s rich embodied knowledge as a writer. Not merely being writing about writing, it is an attentive collection of poems, essays, images and diary entries; they shine a light on how we can keep asking the questions that burn persistently – what it is to live, or love?
What is love? It is the gold thread that connects between our hearts.
Han scribbled this question and insight in her notebook when she was eight years old, and these sentences are the underscore that is pulsing throughout the book. Han’s voice and words, whether Nobel Lecture (Light and Thread) or her gardening diary, or essays on her days after finishing her novel, speak to each other, revealing how her wisdom is drawn from her careful, holistic and embodied observation on her life, and how it transforms to rigorous pursuit of the answer to the question through writing.
What I received from the book is a sense of gentle heat – the image of the mirrors reflecting the sunlight in her garden (in Garden Diary) intersects with her layered reflection on what she experiences in the world, and viscerally delivers the sense of care. In Light and Thread, Han states that body heat is what she senses from the language that connects us to each other, and it is also what I felt from this book; the temperature of true reflection on, and belief in, humanity.
I would recommend this book to not only those who are interested in Han’s artistry, but also anyone who would benefit from the sense of life force driven by a process of profound pondering, curiosity, and hope through the act of noticing and writing.
Reviewed by Yuka