Human Acts

July 4, 2016
After winning the Man Booker International Prize for The Vegetarian, Han has written a harrowing second novel that traces the long-term reverberations from South Korea’s 1980 Gwangju Uprising, in which government troops killed anywhere between 200 and 2,000 civilians in the chaos following the assassination of President Park Chung-hee in 1979. The story opens in that fateful year with Dong-ho, a 15-year-old boy searching for his friend Jeong-Dae while tending to the bodies of protestors in the municipal gymnasium, helping family members identify and claim them. But Dong-ho is soon another casualty in the violence, and the novel, structured in linked stories, traverses the subsequent years to document the aftermath of Dong-ho’s death. The story is told in a combination of first-, second-, and third-person narration by those who knew Dong-ho, and it includes Jeong-Dae’s life after death, a book editor’s fight against censorship, a prisoner’s recollection of his captivity and torture, a former factory worker whose memories of the violence are brought up when an author needs her as a “witness,” and Dong-ho’s mother, remembering her son 30 years after his death. In the final chapter, Han herself reveals her connection to Dong-ho. Han’s novel is an attempt to verbalize something unspeakable, and her characters often find themselves adrift decades after the event. But she humanizes the terrible violence by focusing on the more mundane aspects: tending and transporting bodies, or attempting to work an ordinary job years later. And by placing the reader in the wake of Dong-ho’s memory, preserved by his family and friends, Han has given a voice to those who were lost in the Gwangju Uprising.

August 1, 2016

Man Booker International Prize winner Han Kang triumphed last year with The Vegetarian, her first translation into English, which won achingly terrific reviews here and a No. 2 spot on the London Evening Standard best sellers list. At the heart of this new book, South Korea's best-selling title in 2014 and since sold to 21 countries, is the death of a boy named Dong-ho during a violent student uprising. The story unfolds from the perspectives of Dong-ho's best friend, his shattered mother, an editor battling censorship, and a prisoner and a factory worker burdened with their own devastating memories.

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

January 1, 2017

With Han's The Vegetarian awarded the 2016 Man Booker International Prize, her follow-up will garner extra scrutiny. Bottom line? This new work, again seamlessly translated by Smith, who also provides an indispensable contextual introduction, is even more stupendous. Han drops readers into a mass of deteriorating corpses, the victims of South Korea's 1980 Gwangju Uprising, when student-led demonstrations came to a gruesome end. A 15-year-old boy, searching for his missing friend, enters a school where bodies are being collected and doesn't leave alive. In the five chapters that follow, using Rashomon-like shifts in perspective, Han bears witness to what happened in that death-filled building and the hellish aftermath over decades for those who got out. Han, a Gwangju native, adds her own urgent history in the epilog, erasing any remotely comforting distance the word novel might have provided. VERDICT Lest readers think these events are specific to this place, this time, these people, the author demonstrates how inhumane human acts are "imprinted in our genetic code," citing massacres in Nanjing, Bosnia, and "all across the American continent when it was still known as the New World." The hope of someday conquering that brutal cycle is why every library should acquire this title. [See Prepub Alert, 7/11/16.]--Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon, Washington, DC

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.