Review by junhong - Human Acts

junhong 's review for:

Human Acts by Han Kang

4.0

emotional informative sad tense slow-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Character

Strong character development: Complicated

Loveable characters: N/A

Diverse cast of characters: N/A

Flaws of characters a main focus: N/A

I watched the movie A Taxi Driver a couple of days back, and as usual, after the movie, I googled for more info. First, if this book is your first foray into the Gwangju Uprising, stop. You need supplementary knowledge even to begin to enjoy or understand this book. Watch the movie, read some articles, and heck, read the books mentioned in the foreword, because this book is not going to introduce the event and walk you through how it escalated and progressed and ultimately ended on that faithful day. It's more about the trauma and suffering that continues years after all that brutality. I understand why this won a Nobel Prize, given the subject matter and prose involved, and it offers a distinctly different perspective on this uprising. Instead of showing over and over what happened that day, we fast forward to modern times to see the lasting impact of such an event. Yet, at times, the writer's particular style and the multiple abrupt jumps in timeline between a character's chapters gave my brain a good pounding. If you like to analyse subplots, prose, poems and hidden meanings, this book is a literary gem. I just read for context and perspective, so a lot of those are lost to me. The needed context helps here, as long as you understand that even in 2017, the year A Taxi Driver came out, the government was still suppressing and silencing the actors and the movie while controlling very rigidly the official death tolls. Yet officially, the uprising is recognised as a failure in governance and one of the opening salvos of democracy for South Korea, heck, a president even watched the movie with his wife to commemorate the occasion. Anyway, I am certain most countries have their riots and protests, and they have adopted them as a nation-building moment. Just keep in mind whatever national narrative they have and the agenda of such a moment, rather than taking the "truth" as it is. Tldr, the book is good if you have context and once you adapt and realise who the author is centering the story around.

Content Warnings