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A review by ametakinetos
Human Acts by Han Kang
4.0
Human Acts is a slim number of 218 pages, but weighs on your soul like nothing I have read before.
It's a rarity in that it genuinely encapsulates the national and yet personal trauma that occurs after an event like the Gwangju uprising. The years of pain and survivor's guilt and knowing there are parts of yourself that are never coming back, questioning how you can ever claim to be a united people after the atrocity that occurred.
Why would you sing the national anthem for people who’d been killed by soldiers? Why cover the coffin with the Taegukgi? As though it wasn’t the nation itself that had murdered them.
Kang's straightforward approach captures how life still has to go on, even in the face of tremendous grief (as The Mother says, "the thread of life is as tough as an ox tendon"), but it is accompanied by beautiful, heart-shattering prose that keeps the emotional edge sharp and raw in every line. Using the singular life and death of a middle-school boy, emphasizing the miniscule like a Monami Biro, a candle in a soda bottle, the betrayal of hunger, water from the fountain, the snow seeping through The Writer's socks...the human mind cannot comprehend tragedy on this scale, and thus it is the little things that break us.
I still remember the moment when my gaze fell upon the mutilated face of a young woman, her features slashed through with a bayonet. Soundlessly, and without fuss, some tender thing deep inside me broke. Something that, until then, I hadn't even realized was there.
Another review mentioned this, and I echo it: seeing a POV for one of the soldiers would have been fascinating. It is important to note that mandatory military service for South Koreans began in 1957 and would have been alive and well in 1980. These soldiers didn't enlist out of support for the regime or any particular desire for violence - they were likely not much older than the high schoolers. Exploring their angle would have continued to serve the narrative that we truly don't know the conditions that transform a human into a piece of meat. That all of us have that potential to be just as cruel and unfeeling.
Overall, I recommend this book, but it is no manner peaceful bedtime reading. It will leave you in a much different state than when you began, and there is little in the way of hope.
It's a rarity in that it genuinely encapsulates the national and yet personal trauma that occurs after an event like the Gwangju uprising. The years of pain and survivor's guilt and knowing there are parts of yourself that are never coming back, questioning how you can ever claim to be a united people after the atrocity that occurred.
Why would you sing the national anthem for people who’d been killed by soldiers? Why cover the coffin with the Taegukgi? As though it wasn’t the nation itself that had murdered them.
Kang's straightforward approach captures how life still has to go on, even in the face of tremendous grief (as The Mother says, "the thread of life is as tough as an ox tendon"), but it is accompanied by beautiful, heart-shattering prose that keeps the emotional edge sharp and raw in every line. Using the singular life and death of a middle-school boy, emphasizing the miniscule like a Monami Biro, a candle in a soda bottle, the betrayal of hunger, water from the fountain, the snow seeping through The Writer's socks...the human mind cannot comprehend tragedy on this scale, and thus it is the little things that break us.
I still remember the moment when my gaze fell upon the mutilated face of a young woman, her features slashed through with a bayonet. Soundlessly, and without fuss, some tender thing deep inside me broke. Something that, until then, I hadn't even realized was there.
Another review mentioned this, and I echo it: seeing a POV for one of the soldiers would have been fascinating. It is important to note that mandatory military service for South Koreans began in 1957 and would have been alive and well in 1980. These soldiers didn't enlist out of support for the regime or any particular desire for violence - they were likely not much older than the high schoolers. Exploring their angle would have continued to serve the narrative that we truly don't know the conditions that transform a human into a piece of meat. That all of us have that potential to be just as cruel and unfeeling.
Overall, I recommend this book, but it is no manner peaceful bedtime reading. It will leave you in a much different state than when you began, and there is little in the way of hope.