Snow and freezing rain hits parts of the deep south, closing highways and airports and prompting a first-ever blizzard warning in southwest Louisiana.

In 2016, the South Korean novelist Han Kang won the International Booker Prize for The Vegetarian, the first of her novels to be translated into English. The novel, in which a woman who suddenly refuses to eat meat is treated as if she were mad, was read as a parable of the modern condition, Kafka’s The Metamorphosis or “A Hunger Artist,” updated for the age of feminism and ecopolitics. In October, with three more of her novels now available in English and at least 20 other languages, the Swedish Academy awarded Han the Nobel Prize, elevating her to the empyrean realm reserved for writers of what is sometimes called world literature.

Internationally famous authors need no pity, but the status comes with vulnerabilities. Having been turned into global ambassadors for their culture, they are often accused of becoming deracinated and defanged. Han has dodged the charge so far. But suspicion fell on the English-language translator of The Vegetarian, Deborah Smith, when the novel was propelled into the spotlight. Smith mistranslated some words, but her harsher detractors accused her of betraying Han’s limpid, understated style, torquing it so as to hold the attention of Western readers.

Works transposed into foreign languages—and cultures—inevitably suffer omissions and distortion. That doesn’t make them less authentic. But if you’re trying to understand what Han is up to, adjudicating the stylistic accuracy of the translation is less important than deepening your knowledge of the work’s context, which, like South Korea itself, is at once decidedly Korean and very cosmopolitan.

In The Global Novel: Writing the World in the 21st Century, Adam Kirsch argues that “globalism is not just a fate thrust upon writers, but a theme that writers see it as a duty and an opportunity to explore.” What makes a novel global is not that its author has become a worldwide brand, but that it originates in a consciousness of living and writing in a world with permeable borders, and a desire to make sense of that experience. By Kirsch’s definition, Han writes global novels. Most of them deal—some more obliquely than others—with South Korea’s bloody past as a pawn in great-power politics and the war against Communism.

Perhaps that sounds didactic; rest assured that her novels foreground richly specific narratives about individual characters. History still seeps in, and all the more so when the details have largely been forgotten or obscured. Memories of horrors that younger South Koreans can no longer name produce uncanny symptoms in their bodies and dreams. Han, who is also a poet, commands an impressive arsenal of literary devices, and in her hands, the national repression of trauma—what Milan Kundera called “organized forgetting”—even affects the weather. The pathetic fallacy hasn’t been put to such good use in fiction since Wuthering Heights.

Weather plays a major role in, and may in fact be the main character of, Han’s latest novel, We Do Not Part, translated by e. yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris. Much of the action takes place during a massive blizzard, and the wind and precipitation and skies all have an eerie salience. The snow, though, is most saturated with meaning. It exhibits both agency and pathos, as if possessed by ghosts. Snow blocks the narrator’s way during an urgent journey. It effaces the features of people and landscapes the way amnesia erases memories, and yet it also awakens recollections, many of them unbearable, in those it falls upon. Snow clings desolately to eyelashes and noses. It even weeps, blowing into eyes and melting into tears.

We Do Not Part opens with a nightmare that torments the narrator, Kyungha, night after night, and always makes her wake up in a panic. She is standing before a plain containing vast numbers of ink-black lopped-off tree trunks. Suddenly the sea rises and starts to flood the plain. She knows, with the certainty of a dream, that the mutilated trees mark graves, and that she must stop the water, right now, from dredging up and desecrating the bones. But how?

Kyungha is a writer who published a book about a massacre that took place in a city referred to as G—. As it happens, Han wrote a novel Human Acts, about a pro-democracy movement led by students and activists in Gwangju in 1980 that was put down with extreme violence. Possibly as many as 2,000 protesters (the exact number is not known), most of them young and all deemed to be Communists, were murdered. The novel describes, among other barbaric acts, how soldiers and police threw bodies carelessly into trucks that carted them off to be hidden or burned. Kyungha’s research into G— has left her in a suicidal fugue. She has lost touch with friends; her husband has abandoned her and seems to have taken their daughter with him. Now she lives alone in a tiny rental apartment just outside Seoul, if endlessly rewriting her will and not eating or sleeping can be called living. She is as helpless in life as she is in the nightmare.

[Read: Han Kang’s transgressive art]

Kyungha comes up with a project that she thinks will exorcize it. She will collaborate with a friend, Inseon, a documentary filmmaker, on an art film. The plan is to re-create the dream, setting up dozens of tree trunks on a large piece of land, and then wait for winter and shoot the snow falling over the trunks, “as white as cloth to drape down from the skies and blanket them all.” Han doesn’t interpret the dream or its remedy for us, but we understand that the trunks and bones are meant to stand in for the unburied dead of G—, and that the snow is to serve as their shroud.

Han’s novels vary in style, but they form an unusually interconnected whole—in an interview, a member of the Nobel Prize committee noted “a continuity as to themes that is quite remarkable”—and the color white is a motif in all of them. It is mostly associated with birth and death. Han’s brief, lyrical novel The White Book, about an older sister of the narrator who died a few hours after she was born, begins with a list of “white things,” each of which then becomes the subject of a short meditation. Included on the list are “shroud” and “snow,” as well as “white bird”; along with the enshrouding snow, white birds play a role in We Do Not Part.

The temptation to read the white things of this novel as metaphors or omens is hard to resist. They do function figuratively. Looking through the window of an airplane at an approaching blizzard, for instance, Kyungha mistakes the swirling snow for “tens of thousands of white-feathered birds flying right along the horizon.” They could be albatrosses hovering over the Ancient Mariner.

But the white things do more than symbolize. Like the snow, white birds participate in the action as full-fledged characters. Inseon, who lives alone on Jeju Island, off the coast of the Korean peninsula, is devoted to a pair of white budgerigars—a kind of parakeet—that are nominally pets, but really companions; they speak in words because that’s what parakeets do, but maybe there’s more to it than that. Kyungha is flying into a storm because Inseon, who has been evacuated to a mainland hospital after a horrible accident, has asked her to travel to her remote mountain home to rescue one of the budgies (the other died earlier). Kyungha is incredulous that she agreed to undertake such a dangerous expedition just to save a bird. As she transfers from the plane to a bus, from which she will transfer to another bus and then walk to Inseon’s house, the wind picks up and the snow falls ever more heavily.

Kyungha’s trip to Jeju Island turns out to be merely a frame narrative for a much more terrifying journey, which is into history: Inseon’s history is bound up with the history of the island, which in turn recapitulates the history of South Korea itself. Over the course of the novel, Inseon tells Kyungha how she pieced together a past that her mother had shielded her from. Han’s ability to drop references to momentous events offhandedly, as if they were part of everyday life, is on full display here. As an angry teenager who develops a passionate hatred for everything about her life, particularly her stooped, seemingly subservient mother, Inseon runs away to Seoul, falls through a snowbank into a pit, and nearly dies. When she wakes up in a hospital several days later, her mother is by her side. She had known that something had happened to Inseon, she tells her daughter, because she’d dreamed that she saw her with snow on her face.

A little later, Inseon explains why her mother would have had that dream: “When she was young, soldiers and police had murdered everyone in her village.” (Most of Inseon’s stories are in italics, at least in the translation.) Inseon’s mother and her older sister had been away visiting cousins in another village; when they came home, snow had fallen on the corpses heaped on the grounds of the elementary school, covering their faces, and the sisters couldn’t figure out which were the bodies of family members. So the older sister took out her handkerchief and told Inseon’s mother that she’d wipe the faces, and “you get a good look at them.” And that, Inseon says, is how her mother, as a child, learned that when people died, “snow remained on their cheeks, and a thin layer of bloody ice set over their faces.”

[Read: A novel in which language hits its limit—and keeps on going]

As Inseon follows clues left by her mother, whom she cared for during the last years of her life, We Do Not Part turns into a mystery and a ghost story. It’s a mystery because what happened on Jeju Island—in reality, not just in this novel—is not well known in South Korea, any more than it was to Inseon: In the run-up to the Korean War, the authorities suppressed an uprising there with shocking brutality, in the name of anti-Communism. Historians still aren’t sure whether the death toll was 30,000 or upwards of 80,000, out of a population of about 300,000—far more deadly than the outcome in Gwangju. For half a century afterward, well into the 1990s, few people talked about the slaughter on Jeju Island or dared to search for the dead and missing, because to do so was a crime punishable by torture and imprisonment. In the novel, Inseon learns that her quiet mother had, over the course of decades and in the face of real danger, been active in the movement to recover the remains, inspired by the disappearance of her brother, whom Inseon had never even heard of.

The novel is also a ghost story because hauntings are involved, both the usual kind and others that are the product of Han’s singular imagination. Once Kyungha makes it to Inseon’s home, the place turns out to be suspended between life and death. Neither Kyungha nor the reader is sure whether she is being visited by the revenants of the house’s previous occupants or has already joined them in the afterlife. Outside the house, the wind howls and the snow falls and, having fallen, muffles all sound, and we grasp that the elements are animated by the restless spirits of the tens of thousands who were never accounted for or given a proper burial.

Beyond that, a very large specter broods, palpable even though it never quite comes into view. You could call it the ghost of global history. The proximate cause of the war crimes chronicled in Han’s novels is South Korea’s succession of authoritarian governments, their soldiers and police; on Jeju Island, these were joined by gangs of right-wing thugs. But some of us in the West may have forgotten who the occupying power was at the time, and those who have not forgotten may never have known the extent to which it propped up those regimes and participated in anti-Communist counterinsurgency campaigns—including on Jeju Island. I knew very little of this history when I began to read Han’s novels, nor was I aware that during the Vietnam War, the same foreign government used more than 300,000 Korean troops, essentially as mercenaries, among them soldiers later accused of committing atrocities against Vietnamese civilians. Some Korean veterans of that war were also involved in suppressing uprisings such as the one in Gwangju. These discoveries came as a shock, because the occupier I’m talking about is, of course, the United States.

With her characteristically light touch, Han alludes to American culpability only in passing. In The Vegetarian, we learn that the protagonist’s abusive father earned a medal for his service in Vietnam, but the significance of that fact is not explained. In Human Acts, a character recounts a story about Korean soldiers burning Vietnamese villagers alive and adds, “Some of those who came to slaughter us did so with the memory of those previous times.” A line in We Do Not Part informs us that American military planes released propaganda leaflets over Jeju Island promising amnesty to rebels who turned themselves in; they were arrested anyway.

People in one country often fail to realize how implicated they are in the personal histories of people in countries halfway around the world. Han’s novels never make direct accusations, but her very tact makes the implied indictment all the more devastating. She draws American readers into foreign calamities that their own forebears had a hand in creating, and then offers a very limited kind of redemption—the chance to discover, for themselves, that legacy of shame. Better yet, we do so from the edges of the drama, not the center, where so many American movies about interventions in places like Vietnam seem determined to put us. Globalization is responsible for many bad things, but as Han demonstrates, the global novel is not one of them.

This article appears in the February 2025 print edition with the headline “Where Han Kang’s Nightmares Come From.”

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Frosty pine trees rim the edge of an icy lake. Snow is falling; spa music plays in the background. A gray-haired man with a pleasant face stands beside the lake. He begins to undress. He is going swimming, he explains, to demonstrate his faith, and his opposition to science, to technology, to modernity. “I don’t need Facebook; I don’t need the internet; I don’t need anybody. I just need my heart,” he says. As he swims across the lake, seemingly unbothered by the cold, he continues: “I trust my immune system because I have complete trust and faith in its creator, in God. My immunity is part of the sovereignty of my being.”

This is Călin Georgescu, the man who shocked his countrymen when he won the first round of the Romanian presidential election on November 24, despite hardly registering in opinion polls and conducting his campaign almost entirely on TikTok, where the platform’s rules, ostensibly designed to limit or regulate political messages, appear not to have constrained him. On the contrary, he used the tactics that many social-media influencers deploy to appeal to the TikTok algorithm. Sometimes he added soft, melancholic piano music, imploring people to “vote with your souls.” Sometimes he used pop-up subtitles, harsh lighting, fluorescent colors, and electronic music, calling for a “national renaissance” and criticizing the secret forces that have allegedly sought to harm Romanians. “The order to destroy our jobs came from the outside,” he says in one video. In another, he speaks of “subliminal messages” and thought control, his voice accompanied by images of a hand holding puppet strings. In the months leading up to the election, these videos amassed more than 1 million views.

Elsewhere, this gentle-seeming New Age mystic has praised Ion Antonescu, the Romanian wartime dictator who conspired with Hitler and was sentenced to death for war crimes, including his role in the Romanian Holocaust. He has called both Antonescu and the prewar leader of the Iron Guard, a violent anti-Semitic movement, national heroes. He twice met with Alexander Dugin, the Russian fascist ideologue, who posted on X a (subsequently deleted) statement that “Romania will be part of Russia.” And at the same time, Georgescu praises the spiritual qualities of water. “We don’t know what water is,” he has said; “H₂O means nothing.” Also, “Water has a memory, and we destroy its soul through pollution,” and “Water is alive and sends us messages, but we don’t know how to listen to them.” He believes that carbonated drinks contain nanochips that “enter into you like a laptop.” His wife, Cristela, produces YouTube videos on healing, using terms such as lymphatic acidosis and calcium metabolism to make her points.

Both of them also promote “peace,” a vague goal that seems to mean that Romania, which borders Ukraine and Moldova, should stop helping Ukraine defend itself against Russian invaders. “War cannot be won by war,” Cristela Georgescu wrote on Instagram a few weeks before voting began. “War destroys not only physically, it destroys HEARTS.” Neither she nor her husband mentions the security threats to Romania that would grow exponentially following a Russian victory in Ukraine, nor the economic costs, refugee crisis, and political instability that would follow. It is noteworthy that although Călin Georgescu claimed to have spent no money on this campaign, the Romanian government says someone illegally paid TikTok users hundreds of thousands of dollars to promote Georgescu and that unknown outsiders coordinated the activity of tens of thousands of fake accounts, including some impersonating state institutions, that supported him. Hackers, suspected to be Russian, carried out more than 85,000 cyberattacks on Romanian election infrastructure as well. On December 6, in response to the Romanian government’s findings about “aggressive” Russian attacks and violations of Romanian electoral law, Romania’s Constitutional Court canceled the election and annulled the results of the first round.

Given this strange combination—Iron Guard nostalgia and Russian trolls plus the sort of wellness gibberish more commonly associated with Gwyneth Paltrow—who exactly are the Georgescus? How to classify them? Tempting though it is to describe them as “far right,” this old-fashioned terminology doesn’t quite capture whom or what they represent. The terms right-wing and left-wing come from the French Revolution, when the nobility, who sought to preserve the status quo, sat on the right side of the National Assembly, and the revolutionaries, who wanted democratic change, sat on the left. Those definitions began to fail us a decade ago, when a part of the right, in both Europe and North America, began advocating not caution and conservatism but the destruction of existing democratic institutions. In its new incarnation, the far right began to resemble the old far left. In some places, the two began to merge.

When I first wrote about the need for new political terminology, in 2017, I struggled to come up with better terms. But now the outlines of a popular political movement are becoming clearer, and this movement has no relation at all to the right or the left as we know them. The philosophers of the Enlightenment, whose belief in the possibility of law-based democratic states gave us both the American and French Revolutions, railed against what they called obscurantism: darkness, obfuscation, irrationality. But the prophets of what we might now call the New Obscurantism offer exactly those things: magical solutions, an aura of spirituality, superstition, and the cultivation of fear. Among their number are health quacks and influencers who have developed political ambitions; fans of the quasi-religious QAnon movement and its Pizzagate-esque spin-offs; and members of various political parties, all over Europe, that are pro-Russia and anti-vaccine and, in some cases, promoters of mystical nationalism as well. Strange overlaps are everywhere. Both the left-wing German politician Sahra Wagenknecht and the right-wing Alternative for Germany party promote vaccine and climate-change skepticism, blood-and-soil nationalism, and withdrawal of German support for Ukraine. All across Central Europe, a fascination with runes and folk magic aligns with both right-wing xenophobia and left-wing paganism. Spiritual leaders are becoming political, and political actors have veered into the occult. Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host who has become an apologist for Russian aggression, has claimed that he was attacked by a demon that left “claw marks” on his body.

This New Obscurantism has now affected the highest levels of U.S. politics. Foreigners and Americans alike have been hard-pressed to explain the ideology represented by some of Donald Trump’s initial Cabinet nominations, and for good reason. Although Trump won reelection as a Republican, there was nothing traditionally “Republican” about proposing Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence. Gabbard is a former progressive Democrat with lifelong ties to the Science of Identity Foundation, a Hare Krishna breakaway sect. Like Carlson, she is also an apologist for the brutal Russian dictator Vladimir Putin and for the recently deposed dictator of Syria, Bashar al‑Assad, both of whose fantastical lies she has sometimes repeated. Nor is there anything “conservative” about Kash Patel, Trump’s nominee for FBI director, who has suggested that he intends to target a long list of current and former government officials, including many who served in the first Trump administration. In keeping with the spirit of the New Obscurantists, Patel has also promoted Warrior Essentials, a business selling antidotes both to COVID and to COVID vaccines. But then, no one who took seriously the philosophy of Edmund Burke or William F. Buckley Jr. would put a conspiracy theorist like Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—another Putin apologist, former Democrat (indeed, from the most famous Democratic family in America), and enemy of vaccines, as well as fluoride—in charge of American health care. No “conservative” defender of traditional family values would propose, as ambassador to France, a convicted felon who sent a prostitute to seduce his sister’s husband in order to create a compromising tape—especially if that convicted felon happened to be the father of the president’s son-in-law.

[From the October 2024 issue: Kash Patel will do anything for Trump]

Rather than conservatism as conventionally understood, this crowd and its international counterparts represent the fusion of several trends that have been coalescing for some time. The hawkers of vitamin supplements and unproven COVID cures now mingle—not by accident—with open admirers of Putin’s Russia, especially those who mistakenly believe that Putin leads a “white Christian nation.” (In reality, Russia is multicultural, multiracial, and generally irreligious; its trolls promote vaccine skepticism as well as lies about Ukraine.) Fans of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán—a small-time autocrat who has impoverished his country, now one of the poorest in Europe, while enriching his family and friends—make common cause with Americans who have broken the law, gone to jail, stolen from their own charities, or harassed women. And no wonder: In a world where conspiracy theories and nonsense cures are widely accepted, the evidence-based concepts of guilt and criminality vanish quickly too.

Among the followers of this new political movement are some of the least wealthy Americans. Among its backers are some of the most wealthy. George O’Neill Jr., a Rockefeller heir who is a board member of The American Conservative magazine, turned up at Mar-a-Lago after the election; O’Neill, who was a close contact of Maria Butina, the Russian agent deported in 2019, has promoted Gabbard since at least 2017, donating to her presidential campaign in 2020, as well as to Kennedy’s in 2024. Elon Musk, the billionaire inventor who has used his social-media platform, X, to give an algorithmic boost to stories he surely knows are false, has managed to carve out a government role for himself. Are O’Neill, Musk, and the cryptocurrency dealers who have flocked to Trump in this for the money? Or do they actually believe the conspiratorial and sometimes anti-American ideas they’re promulgating? Maybe one, maybe the other, possibly both. Whether their motivations are cynical or sincere matters less than their impact, not just in the U.S. but around the world. For better or for worse, America sets examples that others follow. Merely by announcing his intention to nominate Kennedy to his Cabinet, Trump has ensured that skepticism of childhood vaccines will spread around the world, possibly followed by the diseases themselves. And epidemics, as we’ve recently learned, tend to make people frightened, and more willing to embrace magical solutions.

Other civilizations have experienced moments like this one. As their empire began to decline in the 16th century, the Venetians began turning to magic and looking for fast ways to get rich. Mysticism and occultism spread rapidly in the dying days of the Russian empire. Peasant sects promoted exotic beliefs and practices, including anti-materialism, self-flagellation, and self-castration. Aristocrats in Moscow and St. Petersburg turned to theosophy, a mishmash of world religions whose Russian-born inventor, Helena Blavatsky, brought her Hindu-Buddhist-Christian-Neoplatonic creed to the United States. The same feverish, emotional atmosphere that produced these movements eventually propelled Rasputin, a peasant holy man who claimed that he had magical healing powers, into the imperial palace. After convincing Empress Alexandra that he could cure her son’s hemophilia, he eventually became a political adviser to the czar.

Rasputin’s influence produced, in turn, a kind of broader hysteria. By the time the First World War broke out, many Russians were convinced that dark forces—tyomnye sily—were secretly in control of the country. “They could be different things to different people—Jews, Germans, Freemasons, Alexandra, Rasputin, and the court camarilla,” writes Douglas Smith, one of Rasputin’s biographers. “But it was taken on faith that they were the true masters of Russia.” As one Russian theosophist put it, “Enemies really do exist who are poisoning Russia with negative emanations.”

Replace dark forces with the deep state, and how different is that story from ours? Like the Russians in 1917, we live in an era of rapid, sometimes unacknowledged, change: economic, political, demographic, educational, social, and, above all, informational. We, too, exist in a permanent cacophony, where conflicting messages, right and left, true and false, flash across our screens all the time. Traditional religions are in long-term decline. Trusted institutions seem to be failing. Techno-optimism has given way to techno-pessimism, a fear that technology now controls us in ways we can’t understand. And in the hands of the New Obscurantists—who actively promote fear of illness, fear of nuclear war, fear of death—dread and anxiety are powerful weapons.

[Autocracy in America: The end of democracy has already begun]

For Americans, the merging of pseudo-spirituality with politics represents a departure from some of our deepest principles: that logic and reason lead to good government; that fact-based debate leads to good policy; that governance prospers in sunlight; and that the political order inheres in rules and laws and processes, not mystical charisma. The supporters of the New Obscurantism have also broken with the ideals of America’s Founders, all of whom considered themselves to be men of the Enlightenment. Benjamin Franklin was not only a political thinker but a scientist and a brave advocate of smallpox inoculation. George Washington was fastidious about rejecting monarchy, restricting the power of the executive, and establishing the rule of law. Later American leaders—Lincoln, Roosevelt, King—quoted the Constitution and its authors to bolster their own arguments.

By contrast, this rising international elite is creating something very different: a society in which superstition defeats reason and logic, transparency vanishes, and the nefarious actions of political leaders are obscured behind a cloud of nonsense and distraction. There are no checks and balances in a world where only charisma matters, no rule of law in a world where emotion defeats reason—only a void that anyone with a shocking and compelling story can fill.

This article appears in the February 2025 print edition with the headline “The New Rasputins.”

The Met Office says wintry weather is expected to bring icy roads and travel delays across the UK.

Snow drives north on Sunday as bitter conditions are set to return for much of the UK next week.

Forecasters are warning there could be considerable travel disruption caused by the wintry conditions.