Reviews with content warning for Grief - Human Acts

A heartache put into prose that deserves to be heard, some places gave me goosebumps, some caused my eyes to feel heavy with the feeling of brimming tears that never really came and just sunk deep into my heart.
I don't feel like I can comment much on this as it is souch a delicate story but I loved everything about the way it was handled: the intertwined different persepctives that connected in one way or another, the usage of 1st person and lastly, the inclution of the writer's experience as well.
In some ways, I could relate these events to Lithuania's own history and the writer's experiences to my own feelings of wanting to keep the memory of all thes brave people alive and the desperate wishing to be able to go back in time and make the suffering go away, to protect everyone somehow or at least let them know that it will all not go in vain.

All in all, I am getting more and more sucked into this topic and also am planning on checking out other Han Kang's works as well, if this was anything to go by.

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kaylamanzanares's review against another edition

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challenging emotional reflective sad slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

5.0

"Testimony. Meaning. Memory. For the future."

Through various characters, different perspectives, and vivid imagery, Han Kang shares with us individual stories, which eventually created a collective experience, as we revisit a very horrible and violent chapter in South Korea's history, the Gwangju Uprising.

In the Introduction, Deborah Smith wrote, "The past, like the bodies of the dead, hasn’t stayed buried. Repressed trauma erupts in the form of memory." In connection with this, there's been a mention of "memory struggle" in one of the MBC documentaries that I have watched. It was stated by Song Doo-hyul that, "Some people want to save their memories and heal, but other people choose to forget and want to be forgotten, trying to avoid the truth. We call it the ‘memory struggle.’ People need to put in effort to save their memory, rather than simply storing it. That effort can be a fight with yourself in a sense, or a fight with a force that encourages oblivion.”

Despite the book being categorized as a work of fiction, the stories and experiences which make up this book are testimonies that what happened in May 18 to 27 of 1980 are tragic, painful, and very much real. The numbers of lives lost, the sacrifices made during those days and succeeding years after, and the trauma people have carried afterwards are not just for any statistics or passing history lessons but they have meaning, names, and stories that deserve to be known and remembered.

I had a hard time reading this book in all honesty, not because of the writing structure or any of those technicalities since Han Kang's visceral writing is so sublime. At first, it was because I really lacked understanding behind the context of Gwangju Uprising which made it hard for me to connect with book. But after watching films and documentaries, my reason eventually became that it is emotionally heavy since it was painful and heartbreaking to read stories of violence, torture, and trauma. Despite the heavy themes surrounding this book, I really believe that it is a MUST READ as this book truly is a "reminder of the human acts of which we are all capable, the brutal and the tender, the base and the sublime."

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moiralyle's review against another edition

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dark emotional informative sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.0

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lowercase_em's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional informative sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.25

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sunny_not's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional informative reflective sad tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

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erd's review against another edition

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dark emotional informative sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.0

This is incredibly tragic, especially since it is based on a lot of true events from the Gwanju Uprising. The mix of narration (different people, different point of view format) was really engaging and steered the story in a very unique way. A very important read, but proceed with caution.

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veneziak's review

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dark emotional

5.0

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katiemcgregor's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional informative reflective sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.0

To call Human Acts heart wrenching would be a misnomer. This book shook me to the very core of my soul. Kang does a magnificent job of introducing her readers to a historical event, they very likely haven't heard before, not through a dull recount of names and dates, but through the grief and destruction left in it's wake. The stories of those who live are just as tragic as of those who die and the whole book feels eerily close to non-fiction.

My main misgiving with Human Acts is the switches in perspectives. I found the second person perspective so jarring that, ironically, it was difficult to put myself in the shoes of the characters whose stories were told from this point of view. Along with the fact that I read a translation, the book is simply stilted in some places where it likely isn't in the original transcript.

I wouldn't say these issues prevent Human Acts from being effective in it's mission. Kang asks questions about humanity that are impossible to answer, but still left me steadily weeping through every section; not the intense type of crying that leaves you dehydrated, but the silent tears that can't be stopped because it feels like there's no other way to grapple with the unimaginable cruelties of this world.

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