Human Acts Han Kang Pdf Download
See a Problem?
Thanks for telling us about the problem.
Friend Reviews
Reader Q&A
Keep in mind, however, that this is not an easy read. Human Acts isn't 'difficult' to read such as Ulysses by Homer but it is challenging because it constantly assaults all of the emotional senses over and over. If a person does not physically cry when they read it, they will cry in their soul.
If a teacher was to select this book for required reading in a class room, I would expect some parents to object.(less)
The beauty of the language in this writing AND translation often caused me to stop and drink in the artistry - in spite of some astoundingly brutal content being described so beautifully...(less)
Community Reviews
This book is brutal and uncompromising; it begins with a flourish of blood and barbarity that is fast and unexpected. However, we only get the aftermath of such butchery. We see the devastation the event has caused, but only ever cat
"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 realised was there."This book is brutal and uncompromising; it begins with a flourish of blood and barbarity that is fast and unexpected. However, we only get the aftermath of such butchery. We see the devastation the event has caused, but only ever catch glimpses of it itself. And herein lays the brilliance of such writing.
When a crowd of student protestors took hold of a Korean city in the 1980s they were gunned down, beaten and just about obliterated by the government forces that occupied the area. The event was later refeed to as The Gwangju-Massacre, and it truly is one of the most disturbing acts of violence in the twentieth century. Many were left dead in the streets, more wounded, and the rest were rounded up and thrown into prison. Google it or, better yet, look at some dramatizations of it on youtube if you want to get more of the facts.
Han Kang side-skips the event itself and begins her novel with a pile of corpses and an ocean of blood; she begins her story with the bodies of all the young people that sung the national anthem whist they were mowed down by their own country's soldiers. When they congregated into the streets with their flags and their cries for democracy, they were met with the result of dictatorship. What follows is the devastation such an event would cause. The people are left in ruins, and trying to pick up any sense of normal life afterwards became near impossible. Nothing could ever be the same for these characters and, no doubt, the people it happened to in real life. They would all remember this dark day.
"Is it true that human beings are fundamentally cruel? Is the experience of cruelty the only thing we share as a species? Is the dignity that we cling to nothing but self-delusion, masking from ourselves the single truth: that each one of us is capable of being reduced to an insect, a ravening beast, a lump of meat? To be degraded, slaughtered - is this the essential of humankind, one which history has confirmed as inevitable?"
The novel is also about legacy. It begins immediately in the morgue, and then moves to the consciousness of a boy looking for a sense of belonging after he has been killed. We then move five years into the future, seeing the malicious punishments inflicted on those that were thrown imprison. Eventually we see how after even twenty years, the effects of the event still haunt the steps of those that were involved.
This is a book about how a single event can, ultimately, change the face of a nation. How do people carry one calling themselves members of a country in the wake of such maliciousness? There is a sense of disheartenment and betrayal due to the sheer shock-horror felt in the wake of one's own leader ordering such an action. Who are they afterwards? The nation is grieving and the people feel lost in this new place the event has caused. Disillusionment, estrangement and a lack of belonging are things that come to mind.
I have but one criticism of this book. The writing was concise and superb; it was emotive, bitter and almost snappy at points. Structurally speaking, the book was a great success. But there's one voice missing in the symphony of souls that lived with the heart ache. What of the men who were just "following orders?" What of the men who pulled the trigger because this is what they were told to do? How did they feel afterwards? Did they actually care? I would love to have seen it represented here.
So if you want to read a book that is raw, real and powerful, then this is where to look. Despite the oversight I mentioned, this is still, without a single doubt, a five star read. Han Kang please carry on writting, and please get all your book translated to English!
___________________________________
You can connect with me on social media via My Linktree.
__________________________________
Human Acts tells an important story that I'm sure many people know nothing about - that of the South Korean Gwangju Uprising in 1980. In a daring plot choice that should have been far more effecti
I had mixed feelings after finishing Kang's The Vegetarian, but I cannot deny that the book sucked me right into it's dark, weird allegory. Which is why I'm surprised that this book left me feeling cold and detached. It feels so distant and impersonal, lacking an atmosphere worthy of the subject matter.Human Acts tells an important story that I'm sure many people know nothing about - that of the South Korean Gwangju Uprising in 1980. In a daring plot choice that should have been far more effective than it was, Kang begins by talking about bodies. Specifically, the corpses lined up in boxes, waiting for family and friends to come identify them. One chapter is even told from the perspective of a dead body.
Are you horrified, and yet intrigued? So was I. Unfortunately, the second person narration is jarring and strange. Where The Vegetarian's weirdness kept me interested enough to read on, here the weird aspects left me feeling detached and bored.
All of the chapters, though connected, feel like individual stories. I jumped around from perspective to perspective, never coming to feel an attachment to any character or their story. I realize I am in the minority, perhaps not unlike how I was with The Underground Railroad, but I cannot connect with these books about historical horrors that lay out in the events in such a cold way, lacking any human emotion.
I appreciate that it is probably a conscious choice on the author's part; a decision meant to serve a purpose and - probably - demonstrate the cold inhumanity of such parts of history, but any book that leaves me feeling emotionally cold, whether intentionally or otherwise, is not one that will stay with me.
Blog | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | Youtube
...more
It's Brilliant.......but, brutal bacteria brain bankruptcy!!!!
If the book cover - alone isn't a clue that this story isn't going to eat through your skin - burn away your flesh - down to your bare bones....then by all means...dive in and find out for yourself!
Inspired writing comes from a real event. Gwangju Uprising, South Korea... 1980
"
It's Brilliant.......but, brutal bacteria brain bankruptcy!!!!
If the book cover - alone isn't a clue that this story isn't going to eat through your skin - burn away your flesh - down to your bare bones....then by all means...dive in and find out for yourself!
Inspired writing comes from a real event. Gwangju Uprising, South Korea... 1980
"Han Kang"....is a "QUEEN-BLEAK-GUT-WRENCHING-POWERFUL-STORYTELLER". She rattled my bones in "The Vegetarian", and hollowed them in
"Human Acts".
Local University students were demonstrating against the Chun Doo hwan government--then were attacked, fired upon, beaten, killed. It was a brutal massacre...by the army and police. They stood for justice - and died for it.
Over 600 people were killed. In Han Kang's book...
she focuses on a 15-year-old innocent boy, named Dong Ho, who was killed.
In the Epilogue.....Han Kang writes about a time - in 2009 - when she was glued to the television watching the towers burning in the middle of the night and surprised herself with words that came out of her mouth...
"But that's Gwangju. In other words, "Gwangju" has become another name for what ever is forcibly isolated, beaten down, and brutalized, for all that has been
mutilated beyond repair. The radioactive spread is ongoing. Gwangju has been reborn only to be butchered again in the endless cycle. It was razed to the ground, and raised up and anew in a bloodied rebirth".
I can imagine the guilty feelings Han Kang had of her 'thoughts'.
Many of the descriptions are gruesome and unbearable...but this story had been kept very quiet from the world ...perhaps by opening it up -there is a possibility for healing to begin.
...more
And that you should read it.
Bottom line: Stop reading my dumb words when Han Kang's are much better.
------------
pre-review
a masterpiece.
review to come / approx 4.5
------------
tbr review
han kang hive rise up
I don't have much to say about this book, beyond you should read it, and it's a wrenching masterwork, and it has so much to say on the subject of pain and suffering and war and power and empire and the evil that humans are capable of.And that you should read it.
Bottom line: Stop reading my dumb words when Han Kang's are much better.
------------
pre-review
a masterpiece.
review to come / approx 4.5
------------
tbr review
han kang hive rise up
...more
Gwangju, South Korea, 1980. Th
''It's the middle of the day, but the dim interior is more like evening's dusky half-light. The coffins that have already been through the memorial service have been grouped neatly near the door, while at the foot of the large windows, each covered with a white cloth, lie the bodies of thirty-two people for whom no relatives have yet arrived to put them in their coffins. Next to each of their heads, a candle wedged into an empty drinks bottle flickers quietly.''Gwangju, South Korea, 1980. The citizens react against the murder of university students by the military regime. The wave of resistance grows more powerful and soon the dictatorship is faced with a revolution. A fight for freedom and democracy for the people of South Korea. The death toll rises by the minute. The morgues and gyms are full of dead bodies, young and old, adults and children. They are carried away like rubbish, the prisons become Hell on Earth. Among the victims, a young man, a student with dreams and aspirations. He is our guide to a course of death, his voice full of melancholy and pain.
This is Han Kang's tribute to the events that shaped her homeland. This is one of the most powerful novels you'll ever have the blessing to read...
''Suddenly it occurs to you to wonder, when the body dies, what happens to the soul? How long does it linger by the side of its former home?''
There is no respect for the living and the dead. Corpses are purposefully abused to become impossible to be recognized. They are loaded into garbage trucks and taken to a mass grave. The regime has eliminated every trace of dignity and justice. Rapes, beatings, torture to the point where you consider those who have died to be incredibly fortunate. The survivors of the atrocities find themselves in limbo. How can you go on living? What has life become following blind hatred and massacre? What is left to keep you going?
''After you were lost to us, all our hours declined into evening. Evening are our streets and our houses. In this half-light that no longer darkens nor lightens, we eat, and walk, and sleep.''
Dong-ho is the focal point of the novel. By his side, his best friend who cannot escape the darkness, a woman who works as an editor and is threatened by the regime that venerates censorship, a prisoner who leads us into the hellish quarters, a former factory worker who struggles to recover from her traumas, and Dong-ho's mother who tries to grasp the terrifying reality that destroyed her world. These voices form a Chorus that narrates a dark tale of the cruelty that human beings are capable of. Unadulterated, shameless, merciless cruelty to impose their power and twisted ambitions.
''After you died, I could not hold a funeral. And so my life became a funeral.''
Why Dong-ho? Because he is one of us, a young student who wanted to decide his own future in a free land. There are no leaders or warriors of fairytales in real life but fighters on a daily basis, simple citizens who demanded freedom. These are the true heroes. Dong-ho becomes a symbol, a beacon in a country covered by darkness. He is one of the thousands of victims of totalitarianism coming from all sides. Left, right, it doesn't matter. They are the two faces of the same tarnished coin. Danger and violence don't recognize ''sides''. It is we who create poles and divide. And this is why History repeats itself. Because we separate violence to ''left and right'', forgetting that there is no difference between two evils.
To speak in literary terms for this novel would be an affront to the impact of the subject matter and Han Kang needs no introductions. Within moments of serenity and beauty, there are scenes of unbearable cruelty and raw violence. And this is how it should be, in my opinion. Novels such as this need to be merciless. To turn our eyes away because of content that is ''hard to read'' is to turn a blind eye to the wounds that have been plaguing mankind for far too long. Let us live in a bubble and in safety...Let us be ignorant…
There are a few passages that are impossible to be described accurately. The writing is transcendental and the second-person perspective is the proper vehicle to engage the readers and hold them tightly in a nightmarish dance to pure horror. That is if the readers are willing to dig deeper into their souls and come face-to-face with acts that can only be committed by the most violent animal in God's creation. The human. Han Kang's Epilogue is a masterpiece in itself.
I will use the clichée I hate and say that this novel should be required reading to every university in the world, in a futile hope to prevent the eternal circle of violence coming from all sides...
''Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.
I forgive no one, and no one forgives me.''
My reviews can also be found on https://theopinionatedreaderblog.word...
...more
After you died I could not hold a funeral,
And so my life became a funeral.
Some historical background: After 18 years of authoritarian rule, South Korean President Park Chung-hee was assassinated on October 26, 1979. Hopes for democracy were dashed when Army Major General Chun Do-hwan seized power in a military coup on December 12, 1979. On May 17, he placed the entire country under martial law under the pretext of national sec
Another powerful book by Han Kang, author of The Vegetarian.After you died I could not hold a funeral,
And so my life became a funeral.
Some historical background: After 18 years of authoritarian rule, South Korean President Park Chung-hee was assassinated on October 26, 1979. Hopes for democracy were dashed when Army Major General Chun Do-hwan seized power in a military coup on December 12, 1979. On May 17, he placed the entire country under martial law under the pretext of national security concerns. The next day university students in Gwangju held a demonstration protesting his oppressive actions. Government troops were sent to forcefully suppress the opposition, but their brutality did not deter the citizens of Gwangju. People from all walks of life came out to defend their community. The fighting continued until May 27, when government forces succeeded in crushing the rebellion. (More detailed information on the Gwangju People's Uprising at the Korean Resource Center.)
In Human Acts, fifteen-year-old Dong-ho's best friend Jeong-dae is killed during a demonstration. Dong-ho ran for safety and feels immense guilt for leaving his friend behind ("There will be no forgiveness. Least of all for me"). The dead bodies are collected in a gymnasium so that families can walk through to find and identify their loved ones. While Dong-ho searches for his friend amongst the dead, he's recruited as a volunteer and incidentally becomes part of the rebellion. Dong-ho is killed by government troops. The chapters that follow are a collection of individual experiences all connected by the Gwangju Uprising and Dong-ho's death.
Our experiences might have been similar, but they were far from identical. What good could an autopsy possibly do? How could we ever hope to understand what he went through, he himself, alone? What he'd kept locked away inside himself for all those years.
The book covers a thirty-year period, from 1980 to 2013. Each chapter is from the perspective of a different person in a different year, but they are all living with the effects of that week in 1980. We hear from Dong-ho, his best friend's spirit, an editor that deals with censors, a man and woman who were imprisoned and tortured for their political activities, and Dong Ho's mother. The epilogue is told from author Han Kang's perspective. During the time of the Gwangju Uprising, she was only 9 years old and her family had just moved from Gwangju to Seoul. While she was out of harm's way, knowledge of the event left an indelible mark on her. She writes about what compelled her to write this book and about the real-life Dong-ho.
You feel the weight of an enormous glacier bearing down on your body. You wish that you were able to flow beneath it, to become fluid, whether seawater, oil, or lava, and shuck off these rigid impermeable outlines, which encase you like a coffin. Only that way might your find some form of release.
The introduction by translator Deborah Smith provides vital historical context and notes about her translation process. She also translated The Vegetarian. Both books are relatively short, but every single word packs a punch. The writing style is accessible, but the content emotionally difficult. There's a visceral physicality to the language and I felt the impact of every word. Han Kang has a remarkable ability to sum up a person or a relationship in just a couple of sentences. That ability is showcased in the portrayal of the relationship between Jeong-dae and his sister Jeong-mi. There are so many moving scenes, but one of my favorites is in "The Editor" chapter, which details the performance of a play with a censored script. It shows how impossible it is to suppress everything. Dong-ho's confusion about the displays of patriotism in a nation where the government is attacking its own citizens and the discussion of what a nation is also made an impression on me.
At that moment, I realized what all this was for. The words that this torture and starvation were intended to elicit. We will make you realize how ridiculous it was, the lot of you waving the national flag and singing the national anthem. We will prove to you that you are nothing but filty stinking bodies. That you are no better than the carcasses of starving animals.
The Vegetarian was the more unique reading experience, but Human Acts evoked stronger feelings in me. I prefer realism and Human Acts is more grounded, while The Vegetarian is surreal and dream-like. However, in both books characters suffer from the long-lasting effects of trauma and the desire to escape the confines of the body. There were several events in Human Acts that reminded me of The Vegetarian, especially in "The Editor" and "The Factory Girl" chapters. I think that reading The Vegetarian would be an even richer experience after reading Human Acts.
Is it true that human beings are fundamentally cruel? Is the experience of cruelty the only hinge we share as as a species? Is the dignity that we cling to nothing but self-delusion, masking from ourselves this single truth: that each one of us is capable of being reduced to an insect, a ravening beast, a lump of meat? To be degraded, damaged, slaughtered--is this the essential fate of human kind, one that history has confirmed as inevitable?
In Human Acts , people's lives suddenly become unrecognizable. Many of them feel an instinctive call to protect their freedoms and the future of their nation, even in the face of almost certain defeat. Through the characters, we explore the push and pull of nobility and barbarism on human nature. What does it mean to be human? If we aren't innately good or bad, is there a way to steer us towards our better impulses? There are several instances where a character assumes decency in another, only to be proven wrong soon after. As bleak as many of the perspectives are, Han Kang doesn't ignore the good in the people. She also writes about the helpers and the soldiers who disobeyed their orders. It's been about six months since I read this book and I still get the same pit in my stomach when I think about it. It's a tough read, but worth the time.
Some of those who came to slaughter us did so with the memory of those previous times, when committing such actions in wartime won them a handsome reward. It happened in Gwangju just as it did on Jeju Island, in Kwantung and Nanjing, in Bosnia, and all across the American Continent when it was still known as the New World, with such a uniform brutality it's as through it is imprinted in our genetic code.
NOTES:
• I highly recommend reading the informative interview with Han Kang over at The White Review.
• I've read a number of books about citizen uprisings from the last seventy years that have taken place all over the world and there's a common thread that runs through most of them: United States support of these oppressive government crackdowns.
• The election of Park Chung-hee's daughter Park Geun-hye in 2013 reopened old wounds. She is currently suspended from office while undergoing impeachment proceedings.
• Related Books: Green Island (citizen uprising/martial law/brutal regimes/Asia), The Buried Giant (collective memory/scars from the past), Between the World and Me (destruction of the body).
I received this book for free from the LibraryThing Early Reviewers Program. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review. It's available now!
...more
This is about the Gwangju Uprising in South Korea in the 80's . The author tells about really brutal deaths of people and school children. This was no peaceful protest.
There are different stories in the book that intertwine together. They are all really sad in more of a sh
This book was pretty horrific in the sense of what happened to these kids and different people in the took. I won't lie, I didn't understand some of the ways the author wrote the story but I grasped it's meaning all the same.This is about the Gwangju Uprising in South Korea in the 80's . The author tells about really brutal deaths of people and school children. This was no peaceful protest.
There are different stories in the book that intertwine together. They are all really sad in more of a shocking way when you read it then crying your eyes out. I'm not sure if that makes sense, but I was just shocked at reading about these things, the detail of how some were killed. I don't doubt anything and shouldn't be shocked at anything, there are shocking killings and things that go on today.
The story of the people that worked on the dead that were brought to hopefully be claimed by family members was sad. How they were piling up and the volunteers trying their best to clean them and cover then depending on how badly they were beaten and there were some horrific descriptions.
How long do souls linger by the side of their bodies?
Do they really flutter away like some kind of bird? Is that what trembles the edges of the candle flame?
They have a Memorial Garden where there are graves and different memorials set up at least from what I read on the internet. I found this picture to be the most heart-wrenching and it puts across so many feelings.
I buried you with my own two hands. Removed your PE jacket and your sky-blue tracksuit bottoms, and dressed you in your dark winter uniform, over a white shirt. Tightened your belt just so and put clean gray socks on you. When they put you in a plywood coffin and loaded it up onto the rubbish truck, I said I'd ride at the front to watch over you.
Just the thought of a mother having to do that to her child because of so much stupidity, violence and ignorance makes me so sad.
I think Han Kang did a great job with this book. I really loved "The Vegetarian" but this book is on a whole other level.
Now I need to go read something happy!
*I would like to thank BloggingForBooks for a print copy of this book*
MY BLOG: Melissa Martin's Reading List
...more
Human Acts is based on real-life historical events, where Kang depicts the lives of several characters who are all connected by the events of the suppressed student uprising in Gwangju, South Korea in 1980. Each perspective travels a little further through time to show how incredibly painful and far-reaching the events of the up
Human Acts was my second Han Kang book, and honestly I couldn't fault it. I rarely give out 5 star ratings, but I just couldn't find anything to dislike about this book.Human Acts is based on real-life historical events, where Kang depicts the lives of several characters who are all connected by the events of the suppressed student uprising in Gwangju, South Korea in 1980. Each perspective travels a little further through time to show how incredibly painful and far-reaching the events of the uprising were, and how much they have affected people's lives as a result.
This book is harrowing to read. Although I wouldn't say I felt sad or emotional reading it, it is perhaps more accurate to say that the feeling I experienced while reading was that of complete and utter emptiness. At one point in the book, I even felt my stomach churn with the stress of what I was reading. The violence in this book, although not overkill, is often brutal and unflinching in its depiction, and the emotions of the characters come through so strongly.
I really loved the way that the characters and their stories were interlinked throughout the years. Often I wouldn't immediately recognise the links, as it was a little hard at times for me to keep track of the different Korean names, but the discovery of who each narrative followed was like a little bit of treasure that I had dug up myself. And the translation of this book should really be applauded - Deborah Smith has once again done a fantastic job of representing Han Kang's prose. It is minimalistic but also beautiful, stark and to-the-point, and I loved the fact that in her introduction to the book not only did she provide some historical context (which I followed up with some googling of course), but also commented on her approach at translating different South Korean dialects that Kang had used, in order to keep it as loyal to the original text as possible.
This wasn't an enjoyable read at all, but I do think it is an important one, and I found out about a section of history that I probably would never have learnt about otherwise. It is horrible to think that these events actually happened, and the depths of the depravity that some people will go too - the book was truly eye-opening, and a fantastic read that should be picked up by everyone.
...more
The Putrefying Bodies piled up into one massive heap, fused in a single mass like the rotting carcass of some multi-legged monster, the blood of its collective hearts surging together into one enormous artery stained the streets in a congealed pool of crimson. Throughout human history, the brutality of wars has
Humanity's essential barbarism is exacerbated not by the especially barbaric nature of any of the individuals involved but through that magnification which occurs naturally in crowds .The Putrefying Bodies piled up into one massive heap, fused in a single mass like the rotting carcass of some multi-legged monster, the blood of its collective hearts surging together into one enormous artery stained the streets in a congealed pool of crimson. Throughout human history, the brutality of wars has repeatedly draped itself over the earth, a uniform brutality it's as though it is imprinted in our genetic code, and so sustained and cyclical in human nature, it seems futile to expect such acts will ever cease. Under martial law - much like Taiwan's White Terror in 1947, or China's Tiananmen Square Massacre in 1989, - savage human rights violations (and denial of burial rites) happened in Gwangju in 1980 during a gruesome ten day debacle, transforming the South Korean city into a human slaughterhouse.
Readers of Han Kang's The Vegetarian might recognize similar images of the human body being violated and eviscerated like animal meat. Though the gore is hardly restrained in the opening chapters of Human Acts, the reader is nevertheless mesmerized, compelled to turn the page. Less a political discourse on oppressive and torturous actions of an authoritarian regime, the novel questions the axis of good and evil in mankind, the strength of human conscience as a collective force, and weighs the value of human loss to those left in the living. In eloquent prose that is an assured testament to the talents of both the author and her translator, Human Acts meanders through time-shifts spanning thirty three years, and narratives that swiftly transition between the perspectives of its characters....
Was it horrifying, for you, Dong-ho, the boy no more than 15 years old, walking among the dead, tallying up the corpses as the putrid stink permeated through the bloodstained national flags that draped them?Why would you sing the national anthem for people who have been killed by soldiers? As though it wasn't the nation itself that had murdered them? Yet, this doesn't phase you as much as the sickening, dreadful need to find your friend out there. ....What terror you must have felt at having just been knocked from your body, the boy's friend ponders, while adapting to his strange new 'existence or nonexistence', like other souls hovering between light and shade , adrift, haunting the edges of the living, left to float aimlessly. How long do souls linger by the side of their bodies? Do they really flutter away like some kind of bird? Is that what trembles the edges of the candle flame? Does it mean I would now only exist in dreams..Or perhaps in memories? Do the survivors remember the dead in dreams? No... in nightmares, in the guilt and the shame such as the editor suffered everyday for the last five years. It occurred to her...that there was something shameful about eating....she thought of the dead, for whom the absence of life meant that they would never be hungry again. But life still lingered on for her, with hunger still a yoke around her neck. Through burning tears, she endured the publisher's abuse in silent revolt, while quietly echoing the censored words no longer readable in the manuscript she holds, After you died I could not hold a funeral, And so my life became a funeral. The death constantly disturbed the prisoner, Why did he die, while I'm still alive? We shared the same cell, were tortured the same brutal way , we ate the same meals - was it that he suffered more than me? .....Every day I fight with the fact of my humanity. Why was I left behind in this hell? thought the boy's mother - chasing you through the market square, but can never catch up with you, because I buried your bloodless body with my own two hands thirty years ago. You were so afraid of the darkness between the trees, on our walks by the riverside. You tugged at my hand, urging, "It's sunny over there, Mum,... Why are we walking in the dark, let's go over there, where the flowers are blooming." The memory stabs me like the cold steel of a bayonet, I can never forget it. Never forget, is why the writer, thirty three years later, interviewed the survivors and penned a requiem to memorialize the forsaken.
The struggle against power was the memory's struggle against forgetting.(Laughter and Forgetting, Milan Kundera).
The native writer succeeds where the conscientious writer must: to remove the muzzle of silence and empower the voiceless masses in this world (or the other). When I think of those ten days in the life of that city, I think of the moment when a man who'd been lynched, almost killed, found the strength to open his eyes. This moment when, spitting out fragments of teeth along with a mouthful of blood, he held his failing eyes open with his fingers so that he could look his attacker straight in the face. The moment when he appeared to remember that he had a face and a voice, to recollect his own dignity, which seemed the memory of a previous life. She writes to preserve the memory of the hundreds of souls that fluttered away in 1980, like some kind of bird; to lead those struggling in the cold and darkness of their past, to a place where the light shines through to where the flowers bloom.
Author Han Kang and translator Deborah Smith were awarded the Man Booker International Prize in 2016 for The Vegetarian. Their second collaboration, Human Acts is a lyrical healing anthem to a wounded nation and a powerful message to humankind to clean up its act. For me, even more remarkable than their first, this novel is not to be missed.
read about the hit-power of this novel
...more
Soundlessly, and without fuss, some tender thing deep inside me broke. Something that, until then, I hadn't even realized was there.
The 1980 Gwangju Uprising of students fighting for democracy and better worker rights, forms the hart of this novel. Almost 2.000 people are thought to have died in resistance to the mil
A visceral book about trauma and the ripple effects violence has on survivors, similar to the effects of a nuclear explosion, impacting people a long time after the facts themselves.Soundlessly, and without fuss, some tender thing deep inside me broke. Something that, until then, I hadn't even realized was there.
The 1980 Gwangju Uprising of students fighting for democracy and better worker rights, forms the hart of this novel. Almost 2.000 people are thought to have died in resistance to the military dictatorship: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gwang...
I mention the Wikipedia page of the event above, because I at least had no idea about the atrocity of the dictatorship in South Korea during this period.
Feelings of loss, survivor guilt and trauma abound in this book. One of the characters muses the following: After you died I could not hold a funeral. And so my life became a funeral.
The brutality of the suppression of the protest is chilling, from cigarette burns on eyelids, vaginal insertion of objects leading to infertility, bajonet stabbings, removing of fingernails, constant beatings, waterboarding, shootings of schoolchildren who surrendered, food deprivation and continuous forcing of a pen in someones hand till the bone is exposed.
No wonder the stories of survivors, loosely tied around a schoolboy who died during the protests and who is the You in most of the book, fall into depression, obsession, isolation, alcoholism or suicide. Even years later nightmares pervade their sleep, if they manage to get any. We also get the tale of the boy himself, his observation of the decay of his own body, being amongst hundreds rotting away after being dragged to a sport centre by garbage trucks.
The account of one of the prisoners was most chilling, with him reflecting on the wish to no longer have or be a body, to erase oneself if only to no longer feel pain and no longer being reduced to a clump of meat:
"Is it true that human beings are fundamentally cruel? Is the experience of cruelty the only thing we share as a species? Is the dignity that we cling to nothing but self-delusion, masking from ourselves the single truth: that each one of us is capable of being reduced to an insect, a ravening beast, a lump of meat? To be degraded, slaughtered - is this the essential of humankind, one which history has confirmed as inevitable?"
The author makes you feel that surviving, instead of dying through being shot in resistance to the regime, could be called a worse fate. The book made me think of both 1984 and its torture scenes and the bleakness of The Road by Cormac McCarthy.
Remembrance is seen as a way out, bearing witness and reminding the world of the atrocities as a means to find purpose and humanity.
But in no way does that feel easy or simple in the face of such violence that people do against each other, everyday in so many anonymous headlines in the newspapers.
Chilling and unsettling, like a gut punch,Human Acts by Han Kang is a second five star read of the author, after the more intimate but equally brutal The Vegetarian.
What made the events sear into her mind and perhaps permanently affect her psyche, was the forbidden photobook that was given to her family, books circulated secretly to let survivors know what had really happened, a book her parents tried to hide from their children, but one she sought out, opening its covers to images she would be forever haunted by.
Asked why she felt motivated to write this book (my thanks to Naomi at The Writes of Women for her post on the author/book discussion at Foyles Bookshop), which begins with the immediate after-effects of the massacre, the very real logistical management of the bodies, the bereaved, mass memorial rituals and the burials and goes on to enter the after death consciousness of one the victims, seeing things from outside his body; she said that that experience of seeing those images left her scared, afraid of human cruelty, struggling to embrace human beings.
It left her with two internal questions below, which were her motivation to enter into this experience and try to write her way out of and the external events of that massacre of the past in her birthplace of Gwangju and then the more recent social cleansing that took place in the Yongsan area of Seoul in 2009:
1. How can human beings be so violent?
2. How could people do something against extreme violence?
Human Acts, which seems to me to be an interesting play on words, is divided into six chapters (or Acts), each from the perspective of a different character affected by the massacre and also using a variety of different narrative voices.
The opening chapter entitled The Boy, 1980 introduces us to Dong-Ho, but seen from outside himself, written in the second person singular narrative voice 'You'. It is after the initial violence in the square and something has driven this boy, initially searching for the body of his friend who he witnessed being shot on the first day, to volunteer and help out, confronting him in a visceral way with so much more death and tragedy than he had escaped from on the day itself.
We meet the shadow of his friend in the second chapter, as he exits his body, but is unable to escape it, he tries to understand what is happening around him and observes his shattered body and others as they arrive, until something happens that will release him wherupon he senses the death of those close to him, his friend and his sister.
The following chapters skip years, but never the prolonged effect of what happened, the events never leave those scarred by them, the narrative works its way back to the origins of the uprising, to the factory girl, the hard working, little educated group of young women trying to improve their lot, to obtain fair wages and equal rights, the become bolder when they meet in groups and speak of protesting, they educate themselves and each other and feel part of something, a movement and a feeling they wish to express publicly, with the naive assumption they won't be arrested or killed.
It brings us back to humanity's tendency to group, to find common interests, to progress as a team with common interests, to support each other and to the tendency of those in power to feel angry, threatened and violent towards those who have an equal ability to amass support, regardless of the merits of their cause.
Han Kang so immersed herself in these stories and events, that it is as if we are reading the experience of a holocaust survivor, a torture sufferer; we know only a little of what it must be like to live with the memory and the reluctance to want to share it and the heavy price that some pay when they do.
I remember Primo Levi's If This Is a Man / The Truce, a memoir, and his words, which could easily have been a guide for Han Kang herself, in the way she has approached this incredibly moving, heart-shattering novel. It seems a fitting note on which to conclude this review, to recall his words and his intention in setting things down on paper.
I believe in reason and in discussion as supreme instruments of progress, and therefore I repress hatred even within myself: I prefer justice. Precisely for this reason, when describing the tragic world of Auschwitz, I have deliberately assumed the calm, sober language of the witness, neither the lamenting tones of the victim nor the irate voice of someone who seeks revenge. I thought that my account would be all the more credible and useful the more it appeared objective and the less it sounded overly emotional; only in this way does a witness in matters of justice perform his task, which is that of preparing the ground for the judge. The judges are my readers. Primo Levi...more
There was nothing cinematic about the treatment of the Gwangju m
The novel at first felt fragmentary, stuttering, hesitant, and understated, but as I read along every sentence, every thought built upon the last, until the story became not only a interwoven chronicle of wrenching human happenings, but also an examination of how humans behave toward one another; how people behave in crowds; how human beings survive trauma (or not); and how they find meaning in the aftermath of unrelenting tragedy.There was nothing cinematic about the treatment of the Gwangju massacre here. There is not much resembling what you might call a 'scene.' Instead the story builds on one small detail after another. The voices interweave in surprising ways. The structure serves to graphically illustrate the interconnection of human beings, as well as the fragility of these connections--people are separated by death, by experience, by class and gender and age, no matter how much they try to remain connected.
I was very surprised at how this novel worked--surprised that it worked at all. I was surprised at how gut-punchingly sad the revelations in the second chapter were, even though the chapter was narrated by a ghost, and the tragedy the ghost tells is told obliquely, not graphically; even so the story in this chapter left me defenseless when it came to the unexpected death of one of the characters.
The nature of obligation and conscience and of right and wrong kept prodding my thinking as I read. Characters wonder aloud about humanity's ability to be inhumane; about their ability to be compassionate.
I cried a few times.
The final chapter was for me a masterful way of wrenching the story from the realm of fiction and into the real world, where it belongs.
...more
It reminded me a little of Vasily Grossman and his account of the Ukrainian famine in Everything Flows - this book has the same unflinching attention to gruesome detail, and as such was not an ideal choice to read over Christmas, but it is a book that is haunting a
This is a sombre and deeply moving book, which bears witness to the brutal suppression of an uprising that took place in 1980 in the city of Gwangju in the south of South Korea (where Han Kang was born), an event I knew nothing about.It reminded me a little of Vasily Grossman and his account of the Ukrainian famine in Everything Flows - this book has the same unflinching attention to gruesome detail, and as such was not an ideal choice to read over Christmas, but it is a book that is haunting and memorable.
...more
A literary masterpiece about humanity
This author continues to astonish me. Her first book, "The Vegetarian", is a totally unique work of fiction. This book, "Human Acts", is a fictionalized account of an actual student uprising in Gwangju, South Korea in 1980. Hundreds of people (estimates run from 600 to 2,000), most of them young students, were killed during this protest. This book focuses on the death of one 15-year-old boy, Dong-ho.
Ms. Kang has a wonderful talent for brin
Human Acts – 5 starsA literary masterpiece about humanity
This author continues to astonish me. Her first book, "The Vegetarian", is a totally unique work of fiction. This book, "Human Acts", is a fictionalized account of an actual student uprising in Gwangju, South Korea in 1980. Hundreds of people (estimates run from 600 to 2,000), most of them young students, were killed during this protest. This book focuses on the death of one 15-year-old boy, Dong-ho.
Ms. Kang has a wonderful talent for bringing her characters to life. She will follow a trickle of sweat down a woman's neck until you can actually feel it yourself. So her re-telling of the brutality inflicted on these innocent people makes it a very hard subject matter to read. These people become a part of your life so there's no turning away when terrible things happen to them. I found it to be a very emotional book. This is not a book for the faint hearted. There are horrendous torture scenes depicted. But as always when human acts are at their worst, there are also acts of courage and solidarity and love and hope.
The book is written in interconnected chapters covering the period right before the uprising began in 1980 through 2013. They include the stories of a young boy searching for his presumed-dead friend, a mother facing denial, an editor dealing with censorship, a prisoner trying to find a reason to continue living and a victim struggling with nightmares so many years later. There is even a chapter about a young victim whose consciousness is still connected to his dead body who tries to puzzle out why he was killed. The last chapter is about the author's own personal connection with Gwnagju. There is a scene in this book about a censored play that was so moving and powerful that I will never forget it. Often the characters tell their stories to "You" who is unnamed. The unnamed "You" is sometimes meant to be you, the reader, other times it's you, the dead and yet other times it's you, the people as they were before the massacre.
Ms. Kang has written a fitting tribute to the victims of the Gwangju uprising. Quite a literary masterpiece. Highly recommended.
I won a copy of this book in a LibraryThings giveaway.
...more
"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 realised was there."
A semi-fictional account of unnecessarily violent supression of a student uprising in Han Kang's home town, Gwangju, South Korea in 1980 through point of view of inter-related characters. I guess it would have been brutal to expec
"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 realised was there."
A semi-fictional account of unnecessarily violent supression of a student uprising in Han Kang's home town, Gwangju, South Korea in 1980 through point of view of inter-related characters. I guess it would have been brutal to expect another 'The Vegetarian' from her but this is beautiful in its own way - showing what it means having to live through such incidences - how it changes the way one sees the world:
"Is it true that human beings are fundamentally cruel? Is the experience of cruelty the only thing we share as a species? Is the dignity that we cling to nothing but self-delusion, masking from ourselves the single truth: that each one of us is capable of being reduced to an insect, a ravening beast, a lump of meat? To be degraded, slaughtered - is this the essential of humankind, one which history has confirmed as inevitable?"
what it means to lose someone dear to illogical brutalities of psychopaths that seem to be getting hold of power everywhere - that is, to lose them so entirely both body and soul taken away from you (there must be something soothing for a grieving person in the acts of last rites, something that helps them to come to terms with their loss - and several mothers were deprived of that 'something'):
"After you died I could not hold a funeral,
And so my life became a funeral.""After you were lost to us, all our hours declined into evening.
Evening are our streets and our houses.
In this half-light that no longer darkens nor lightens, we eat, and walk, and sleep."
and how survival in such cases is just a relative term - how you come out of such things different, broken irreparably (remember Headth Ledger's 'Whatever doesn't kill you, makes you stranger.")
"I'm fighting alone, every day. I fight with the hell that I survived. I fight with the fact of my own humanity. I fight with the idea that death is the only way of escaping this fact.""Some memories never heal. Rather than fading with the passage of time, those memories become the only things that are left behind when all else is abraded. The world darkens, like electric bulbs going out one by one. I am aware that I am not a safe person."
*****
...more
"Glass is transparent, right? And fragile. That's the fundamental nature of glass. And that's why objects that are made of glass have to be handled with care. After all, if they end up smashed or cracked or chipped, then they're good for nothing, right, you just have to chuck them away.
Before, we used to have a kind of glass that couldn't be broken. A truth so hard and clear it might as well have been made of glass. So when you think about it, it was only when we were shattered that we proved we had souls. That what we really were was humans made of glass."
Human Acts is a breath of fresh air after Kang's disappointing The Vegetarian. I give every author a second chance, no matter how much I despise the first story I read from them. Sometimes, it works out in my favor. This
First and foremost, everyone who loves beautiful writing should read this book. That being said, results may vary. My idea of beautiful may not be your idea of beautiful. This book contains disturbing imagery described passionately. Kang finds beauty in even the ugliest places.Human Acts is a breath of fresh air after Kang's disappointing The Vegetarian. I give every author a second chance, no matter how much I despise the first story I read from them. Sometimes, it works out in my favor. This was one of those times.
This is the first mosaic novel I've enjoyed. Mainly because I never know, going in, that these novels are mosaics. Many of these books are marketed as novels, when, in fact, they are collections of connected short stories. If I go into a novel wanting a novel, I want a novel, not a short story collection. Nothing wrong with collections. I've published three myself, so far be it from me to knock the format. But I want to know if that's what I'm reading. Sometimes I feel like a nut, sometimes I don't.
The Vegetarian was also written in this mosaic style, with alternating POVs, with a different character in every chapter, so I'm assuming that is just this author's style. Here we find everything from the rarely-well-done second-person POV to the little-used epistolary format to the commonly-used first-person perspective. I dug how Kang juggled the styles here. The switches didn't feel near as jarring as they did in The Vegetarian, and I actually cared about the people in this book, whereas her last novel was plagued by an entire cast of unlikable assholes who were not given near enough time to develop. I'm all for stories about irredeemable folks, but give me a dog to care about, or something.
The book has one chapter in particular that resonated with me and it might have affected my rating by a star. Meaning, I'm giving this novel five stars based on one 30-page chapter. If the second part didn't exist, this would be a solid four-star read. But "The Boy's Friend" pushed this into perfect-territory for me. Although they might exist outside of this novel, I've never before read a sequence of events in such a way. I was awestruck by the delivery. Probably in my top ten best written chapters of all time.
In summation: Everybody has a bad day. Judging them solely based on one awful outing is short-sighted. I'm glad I gave Kang another chance. Human Acts was just what I was looking for at this moment in my life. All five stars are, without a doubt in my mind, deserved. Thanks to Crown Publishing for thus far providing me with two of this author's works, free of charge, in return for unbiased reviews.
Final Judgment: Timely and poignant, especially in today's political climate.
...more
Probably not surprisingly, I had never heard of this event, and had only recently heard of Gwangju because a former student worker moved there to teach English. But we had people from South Korea visiting us regularly, a minister who ran an orphanage in Seoul. Perhaps he like those living in the book considered Gwangju as irrelevant to Seoul, or he had other priorities, but I remember more about his stories of his Dad being killed by the Chinese than I ever heard stories like this.
The historical events of the Gwangju Uprising have been covered substantially in Korean film and literature. The introduction to this novel (by the translator) explains that Kang wanted to do something differently. No heroics, only corpses. It is indeed graphic in the sense of dead bodies, horrific in the sense that characters can do little to escape it. There is even a character that feels like foreshadowing of The Vegetarian, one who starts being sickened by meat and refuses to eat it. It made me wonder if the roots of that novel are found here; if the character of Yeong-hye has more than nightmares in her memory....
I was able to access a review copy of this book from the publisher through Edelweiss, in exchange for an honest review. The book actually came out in January in English, so they may just be promoting it after the success of The Vegetarian (which is on the shortlist for the Man Booker International Prize.)
...more
I was hesitant to read this, because the subject is disturbing and I did not love The Vegetarian, but Human Acts is breathtaking. Even though the book is translated, the rhythm and flow are beautiful!
I'm not sure how a book can be so beautiful but at the same time rip my heart out, but this one did.I was hesitant to read this, because the subject is disturbing and I did not love The Vegetarian, but Human Acts is breathtaking. Even though the book is translated, the rhythm and flow are beautiful!
...more
The language used in this novel is starkly beautiful and poetic, and in some ways that makes its unflinching telling of this h
Human Acts is a novel based on the true events of the Gwangju massacre of 1980 (which I knew nothing about before starting this book). It is told from the perspective of different people involved in the violently suppressed uprising, and centres especially around the middle school student Dong-Ho who we meet in the first chapter, when he is looking for his missing friend.The language used in this novel is starkly beautiful and poetic, and in some ways that makes its unflinching telling of this horrifically violent and senseless period of Korean history all the more disturbing and upsetting.
This is a deeply profound and sombre book that will stay with me for a very long time. Highly, highly recommended.
...more
This line appears toward the end of Han Kang's (author of The Vegetarian) new book, Human Acts. And certainly Kang has an amazing ability to gaze steadily at painful material, as witnessed in both her books.
The pain in Human Acts is different than that of The Vegetarian. In The Vegetarian, we followed the suffering of one woman, in Human Acts, that of thousands. The book is based on the Gwangju uprisi
"…if we can only keep our eyes open, if we can all hold our gazes steady, until the bitter end…"This line appears toward the end of Han Kang's (author of The Vegetarian) new book, Human Acts. And certainly Kang has an amazing ability to gaze steadily at painful material, as witnessed in both her books.
The pain in Human Acts is different than that of The Vegetarian. In The Vegetarian, we followed the suffering of one woman, in Human Acts, that of thousands. The book is based on the Gwangju uprising (in South Korea) in 1980 and the massacre of its participants. We see the event through the eyes of a young boy, Dong-ho, his grieving mother, his friend, a woman who "survived" (the survivors are all so traumatized by their experience that the word "survival" seems almost meaningless; although they are physically alive, they are shattered), and a contemporary poet who is researching the event.
The brutal events are told with writing so beautiful it renders the harshness of the events even more vividly. There are repeated images of brokenness ("Soundlessly, and without fuss, some tender thing deep inside me broke. Something that, until then, I hadn't even realized was there," and "…it was only when we were shattered that we proved we had souls. That what we really were was humans made of glass.").The innocence of the young dissidents, students not only at the university but high schools, even middle schools, the beauty of Kang's lyrical descriptions of their idealism contrasts stunningly with their vicious slaughter and, still worse, the torture of those who "survived" the initial attack. One of the survivors writes of "that moment when the contours of suffering coalesce into clarity, a clarity colder and harder than any nightmare could ever be."
Kang's writing is filled with moments of this kind of clarity. It is often a difficult and painful book to read. It is terrifying to see what humans can do to each other. There are the human acts of resistence and the inhuman-and yet, still, somehow, human-acts that are brutally perpetrated by one person onto another. There were times I could hardly bear to go on and moments when it seemed that the courage of the dissidents was turned into some kind of cruel joke in the light of their merciless treatment.
Did their suffering serve any purpose? Did it in any way help end the dictatorship? One of the characters remembers how a leader kept repeating "We are noble" but this nobility seems pale in comparison to the suffering that ensues.
While not a book for the faint-hearted, Human Acts seems to me to be a necessary one to read, to honor those who fight oppression everywhere, to those who die unknown and unacknowledged or live scarred and suffering. Kang has created a vivid depiction of a doomed uprising. It is a brave and wonderful work.
I want to thank LibraryThing and Han Kang for making this book available to me in exchange for an honest review.
...more
Sounds like a compelling plot as Kang plays witness to the events of 1980. But these are all bookish quotes objectively examining this second translated work from Kang that makes The Vegetarian seem like a happy fairy tale.
But it had such a profoun
The writing is beautiful and the translation assured. It follows several people in the aftermath of the Gwangju uprising and subsequent quelling by the army. The aftermath creeps across the years as dark tendrils that still lay hold of those involved.Sounds like a compelling plot as Kang plays witness to the events of 1980. But these are all bookish quotes objectively examining this second translated work from Kang that makes The Vegetarian seem like a happy fairy tale.
But it had such a profound effect on me. I remember visiting South Korea with my family in the late 80's on vacation. I'm Canadian born and raised with parents that embrace and love their lives here in Canada - perhaps at the expense of a deliberate forgetting, if not tight-lipped stoicism of their pasts in Korea. I remember standing in a train station in Gwangju and seeing plastered on columns everywhere photos of the aftermath. These weren't the photojournalism shots we see of sweeping vistas of destruction taken from a remove, anonymous bodies strewn on a dusty roadway. They were almost pornographic. Close up shots of just what remained of a face, now looking remarkably like a halloween mask, the skull completely staved in from repeated bludgeoning. Gore and viscera displayed in a public transit station, multiple strangers in death for all to examine. Closely. Maybe that's what was in the chapbooks referenced in the book. I see them in my head now.
I'm a tourist. I've spent maybe a year total in South Korea. I have only the most rudimentary understanding of the language. I live a privileged, suburban, middle-class existence so take all my hand-wringing as me-too relevance seeking.
I've taught Dong-ho and kids his age in South Korea in small towns. I've been in the concrete sheds that pass for gymnasiums and walked the dirt packed floors of regional office buildings. I've passed by open fields where communities still burn all their garbage. I've witnessed the intense physicality of Koreans so at odds with the expansive space of Canada and personal boundaries.
And though I've never seen it I can imagine them all dead too. I can imagine 15 year old boys tending to hundreds of dead bodies with a matter of fact resolve. I can imagine teachers tortured, struck and humiliated. I can see them just as easily being the ones torturing, hitting and humiliating. In a country where every male has mandatory military service I see only a thin line between tortured and torturer.
And it just wrecks me. That's what a good writer is supposed to evoke but I can't call what this brings up as enjoyable. Kang dredges up so much of what is ugly and distorted and lays it out in a joyless manner and dares you to look away. I see little in the way of hope, and maybe that's more honest. If you liked The Vegetarian you're going to love Human Acts. It just leaves me cold.
...more
It's a dark view, but for those who survived the Gwangju Uprising of 1980, it would appear that cruelty is, indeed, part of being human. As happens all too often in history, laborers and students rose up against a dictatorship and later were arrested or massacre
Is it true that human beings are fundamentally cruel? Or, in the words of one of the characters in Human Acts, "To be degraded, damaged, slaughtered – is this the essential fate of humankind, one that history has confirmed as inevitable?"It's a dark view, but for those who survived the Gwangju Uprising of 1980, it would appear that cruelty is, indeed, part of being human. As happens all too often in history, laborers and students rose up against a dictatorship and later were arrested or massacred. As a result, in Korea, the name Gwangju is synonymous with "for whatever is forcibly isolated, beaten down, and brutalized, for all that has been mutilated beyond repair."
The novel, told in six parts and encompassing 35 years, shows how this act – like radiation – continues to affect the lives of those who remain. In the first chapter, a 15-year-old boy named Dong-ho futilely searches for his best friend Jeong-dae. Soon we learn that Dong-ho is yet another victim, with his soul staring into his own body's dead eyes. The massacre is played back by a female editor who was tortured, by a factory worker who was brutalized, and, in one of the most emotionally haunting sections, by Dong-ho's mother, who heartbreakingly recalls his earliest years. Han Kang becomes her own character in the epilogue, revealing her own reasons for feeling compelled to tell the story.
Reading Human Acts in close proximity to Han Kang's award-winning novel The Vegetarian, it's easy to detect certain similarities: the unrelenting darkness of the vision, the multiple narrators, the glimpse into acts of resistance, the gradual insights as the big picture emerges. Yet while The Vegetarian was psychologically intimate, Human Acts is broader, dealing not with a family's trauma, but an entire country's. As a result, it transcends The Vegetarian's theme of "what does it mean to be human" and instead, focuses on "what does it mean to transcend our human condition and make the corpses we sing over into something more than just "butchered lumps of meat."
There is no doubt that Human Acts has aggressive goals: evaluating the macrocosm of trauma as opposed to analyzing it on a smaller one-on-one scale. I, as a reader, was affected more deeply by the mother's story than, say, the editor's story on the crackdown on literature. In a prologue, Han Kang's excellent translator, Deborah Smith, states that this book is "A reminder of the human acts of which we are all capable, the brutal, and the tender, the base and the sublime." Although the balance weighs to the brutal and base, there is just enough of the tender and sublime to provide hope. 4.5 stars.
...more
The man from Gwangju would have still been there at the time of the Uprising, not leaving until two years later. He would have performed his obligatory military service, but that would have ended long before the rebellion of May, 1980.
I learned these sparse detail
I know a man from Gwangju. He is a gentle man, soft-spoken. I have watched him swaying a baby in his arms, tirelessly, for hours. He lives here now, in the United States; he has done well here - but he speaks with pride of South Korea.The man from Gwangju would have still been there at the time of the Uprising, not leaving until two years later. He would have performed his obligatory military service, but that would have ended long before the rebellion of May, 1980.
I learned these sparse details about the man from Gwangju just now, as I was reading this novel. And now I wonder what he saw, what he felt, 37 years ago.
Gwangju, there in the south, was known for its dissent. There, a democratization movement began, grew. Students, of course, but also factory workers. So it was a labor movement, too. Martial law was the governmental response. Then more protests. Then Special Forces came and eventually they opened fire. Two hundred died, but that mere number ignores the brutality, the torture, the sadism.
The justification was a fear of Communism from the North. It required the United States' consent to move government forces from the DMZ to Gwangju. The United States consented. President Reagan, it is said, strongly endorsed the action.
Strongmen and 10,000 banners. Children armed with guns. Twenty-six police died, too. A novel and Wikipedia. What to make of these events?
Well, I know a man from Gwangju . . .
...more
–M Lynx Qualey
from The Best Books We Read In January 2017: http://bookriot.com/2017/02/01/riot-r...
____________________
Set during a violent student uprising in South Korea, this is the story of the death of a young boy named Dong-ho; of the heartbreak and hopelessness felt by the oppressed; and of humankind's eternal struggle for justice and peace. Kang has once again painted a brutal and beautiful portrait of violence and love among people trying to find their voices. It's a raw, affecting novel.
Backlist bump: The Vegetarian by Han Kang
Tune in to our weekly podcast dedicated to all things new books, All The Books: http://bookriot.com/listen/shows/allt...
...moreHan Kang is the daughter of novelist Han Seung-won. She was born in Kwangju and at the age of 10, moved to Suyuri (which she speaks of affectionately in her work "Greek Lessons") in Seoul.
She studied Korean literature at Yonsei University. She began her writing career when one of her poems was featured in the winter issue of the quarterly Literature and Society. She made her official liter
소설가 한강Han Kang is the daughter of novelist Han Seung-won. She was born in Kwangju and at the age of 10, moved to Suyuri (which she speaks of affectionately in her work "Greek Lessons") in Seoul.
She studied Korean literature at Yonsei University. She began her writing career when one of her poems was featured in the winter issue of the quarterly Literature and Society. She made her official literary debut in the following year when her short story "The Scarlet Anchor" was the winning entry in the daily Seoul Shinmun spring literary contest.
Since then, she has gone on to win the Yi Sang Literary Prize (2005), Today's Young Artist Award, and the Korean Literature Novel Award. As of summer 2013, Han teaches creative writing at the Seoul Institute of the Arts while writing stories and novels.
...moreArticles featuring this book
And so my life became a funeral."
Welcome back. Just a moment while we sign you in to your Goodreads account.
Source: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30091914-human-acts
Posted by: lamarlamarfragozoe0269209.blogspot.com
Post a Comment for "Human Acts Han Kang Pdf Download"