Human Acts
Ratings56
Average rating4.4
Very difficult book to read about first hand accounts of the Gwangju Uprising, and fight for civil rights in South Korea. Five stars, very well written and translated about such difficult subject matter - a book I will continue to remember, and revealing about history I have known little.
Got to 70% and gave up :( if you're reading this, don't be discourage at giving it a go. It was my first Korean book in translation and so I wasn't sure what to expect. The writing is poetic and beautiful at times but overall the subject matter was just a little too depressing for me personally and the unfamiliar narration style made it hard to get drawn into the narrative. However happy that I gave it a good shot
Until late December 1977, I was a Peace Corps Volunteer teaching English at Chonbuk University in Jeonju City, the capital of North Jeolla Province of South Korea. I was there for two years and it was a tense time politically, both internally and because of the ongoing conflict with North Korea. While Jeonju City was fairly calm–it's an agricultural province known for its great food–the neighboring province, South Jeolla, was a hotbed of anti-government activity. Tensions weren't unknown in Jeonju, though. I remember that one of my students stopped showing up to classes. When I asked where he was, the students wouldn't tell me, but I eventually learned that he'd been arrested for demonstrating against the government.
Just a year and a half after I left Korea, the ruthless President, Park Chung-hee, was assassinated. In 1979-80, demonstrations against the government and the newly installed President Chun grew, especially in Gwangju, the capital of South Jeolla. In May, the demonstrations were brutally quelled and an unknown number of people were killed by the military. (Officially, the number is under 200 dead; unofficially the number is between one and two thousand.)
The Gwangju Uprising is the subject of this book, which is told in stark and gruesome detail. It is shocking because while the dramatization is imagined by the author, the story is true. It's told from a variety of points of view, mostly focused on a middle-school boy, Dong-ho, who participates in the demonstrations and later is remembered by various survivors and witnesses.
It's not an easy book to read, but it's an important one. Never again. We hope.
beautifully written & unflinchingly raw. one of my favorite reads ever; human acts is the paragon of non-linear narratives & changing perspectives. the differing narration styles (first/second/third person) & the change in structure really highlights the "mystery" element of this novel. "mystery" in the sense that the reader is trying to get the full picture of dong-ho's life&death, but also the different people of gwangju and the full, long-term effects state violence had on the country & city.
no character is wasted. the tight, small (named) cast makes each moment more heartwrenching; each character is given their ending and has their story told.
han kang's writing isn't for everyone, but i found her style remarkable! i really enjoy her esoteric vernacular. credit where credit is due, i think deborah smith's translation of human acts will be much more pleasing to critics of the vegetarian. one of my personal gripes with the eng version of the vegetarian (though i'd like to think i'm a bit more forgiving than the average article writer) was that its differing tone in english. i felt as if kang's writing (in korean) is extremely vivid & grounding, which makes her more fantastical writing topics (such as about the soul re: human acts & dreams re: the vegetarian) have much more of an impact. smith really nailed the grittiness of kang's style in human acts & i feel as if the kor & eng versions read more or less the same !
just a really spectacular book detailing an important part of rok's history written beautifully. i have read no one more deserving of the nobel prize.
This was such a devastatingly beautiful read. It's impossible to read this book with dry eyes.
I tend to avoid books that contain such gruesomeness, especially those detailing on times of conflicts and wars. But the beauty of the book lies in its writing and I loved how deeply the book affected me.
Heartbreaking, I read a lot about Gwangju uprising and it was truly horrific. This book was really moving and shocking..
“After you died I could not hold a funeral,
And so my life became a funeral.”
Heartbreaking and beautifully narrated. I loved the varied perspectives, but would have loved a little more of a plot or a conclusion. The types of characters and their experiences really carried this book though, making it totally worth the read.
Loosely connected fragments and lives centred around the 1980 Gwangju uprising when the South Korean government brutally killed and tortured many students. We inhabit different minds, in the past and the present, of the living, the survivors, and the dead. The novel questions the acts we as humans are able to commit against each other, and the scars and weight those who suffered have to carry with them forever. I love Han's [b:The Vegetarian 25489025 The Vegetarian Han Kang https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1478196580s/25489025.jpg 18449744] but I couldn't quite connect with this one. The writing is beautiful and haunting, yet it had too many POVs for my taste and the storytelling was too vague, too torn.
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.
I don't think I've been this devastated reading a book since I read Night by Ellie Wiesel in High School. However, by the same token that that book is required reading, so too should Human Acts also be a required read.
It is much easier to sit and read facts about history, but much more difficult when the same event is told through the eyes of people; individuals with emotion, dreams, beliefs, hopes, friends, and family. Han Kang takes this brutal, horrific event and humanizes it so you don't see numbers or news articles, but flesh and blood people. People who just as easily could be your family or friends. And this is where her novel Human Acts excels. I was an absolute puddle of tears multiple times, but most especially at the end.
It has eerily fresh parallels to the current political climate, whether about the danger of suppression of media no matter what the political view, government control of the narrative of events or using martial law to shut down peaceful protest because the government doesn't agree with the protester's stance. It reminds us to be vigilant so history isn't repeated. And it can only do that by telling the story through the eyes of those who died because of it, lived through it and were left with a loss so deep that 40 years on they continue feel that devastation keenly.
A very powerful book, that deserves to be held in a high regard and to read by many.
“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.”
Human Acts is the story of the Gwangju Uprising in South Korea in 1980, told from the perspectives of seven narrators - some named, some unnamed. The author examines the idea that time heals all wounds, and presents a different possiblity - that time, instead, turns memories into ghosts, which stay with us for a lifetime.
This was not an easy book to read, as it deals frankly and graphically with war, torture, and suicide. It is, however, a read that felt timely, especially with the current geopolitical climate.
