“Heavy Snow”
by Han Kang
translated from the xxx by e. yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris
from the November 18, 2024 issue of The New Yorker
This week we get a new story from the recent winner of The Nobel Prize in Literature. I have read two of Han Kang’s novels, and my reaction has been that I don’t quite get what’s going on. Maybe “Heavy Snow” will be just what I’ve been hoping for.
Here is how it begins:
Kyungha-ya.
That was the entirety of Inseon’s message: my name.
I met Inseon the year I graduated. I was hired by a magazine where the writers mostly took their own photographs, but for important interviews and travel articles we’d pair up with freelancers we’d booked ourselves. Going on the road meant as many as three nights and four days spent in company, and, on the advice of my colleagues, who said it was best for women to team up with women and men with men, I called several photo production houses until I was introduced to Inseon, who happened to be the same age as me. For the next three years, until I left the magazine, Inseon and I went on monthly assignments together. We’d been friends for well over two decades by now, and I knew most of her habits. When she started a conversation with my name, I knew she wasn’t simply checking in but had something specific and urgent she wanted to discuss.
I’m excited to give this a go! Please feel free to share your thoughts below!
If there is a book published containing the Best Short Stories in the World for this year, this one, “Heavy Snow,” by Han Kang needs to be included.
An excerpt should also be included in all the expert writing advice books for best example of most amazing use of “description.”
The destiny of actual, authentic snowflakes might not seem so important in the grand scheme of things. But it is anthropomorphically brilliant how Kang uses their kismet to indirectly comment on the human spirit’s struggle for survival. If a prospective reader ever thinks deeply about that.
“. . . each flake seems to falter for a moment. Then, like a trailing sentence at the close of a conversation, like the dying fall of a final cadence, like fingertips cautiously retreating before ever landing on a shoulder, the flakes sink into the slick blackness and are soon gone.”
Kang’s very finely tuned sensibility seems notice everything that is going on in a particular sequence of events. She writes about things and people that may only resonate for those who easily connect to the mysteriousness of nature and the unknowability of the human spirit, and the sometimes brutal nature of what is and how it all connects with how we live our lives.
This might not resonate for readers who don’t usually think deeply about the perils of existence, even for a caged bird. It is not usually a very comforting thing to contemplate.
The tone of this story is so simple, so direct, honest and truthful that it makes for a compelling impact on the reader. And it generous offers a measure of solace very rarely on offer in modern literature.
I don’t want to spoil this story by telling anymore about it. But there is a delicate ray of hope underneath infused throughout that can especially be seen in how a reader interprets the ending.
Highest recommendation!
Thank you, Larry, for your words. I am stunned by the beauty of this story that I read, coincidentally, during a snowstorm. The exquisite language mirrored my actual vision as the snow fell. I was inside, warm and dry, but I felt the storm outside as well. It is the closest I will probably ever come to an out-of-body experience.
That’s amazing. I wish Han Kang could read your comment! You might be able to send it to her through her publisher.