Human Acts

The Boy, 1980

Looks like rain, you mutter to yourself.

What ll we do if it really chucks it down?

You open your eyes so that only a slender chink of light seeps in, and peer at the gingko trees in front of the Provincial Office. As though there, between those branches, the wind is about to take on visible form. As though the raindrops suspended in the air, held breath before the plunge, are on the cusp of trembling down, glittering like jewels.

When you open your eyes properly, the trees outlines dim and blur. You re going to need glasses before long. This thought gets briefly disturbed by the whooping and applause that breaks out from the direction of the fountain. Perhaps your sight s as bad now as it s going to get, and you ll be able to get away without glasses after all?

Listen to me if you know what s good for you: come back home, right this minute.

You shake your head, trying to rid yourself of the memory, the anger lacing your brother s voice. From the speakers in front of the fountain comes the clear, crisp voice of the young woman holding the microphone. You can t see the fountain from where you re sitting, on the steps leading up to the municipal gymnasium. You d have to go around to the right of the building if you wanted to have even a distant view of the memorial service. Instead, you resolve to stay where you are, and simply listen.

Brothers and sisters, our loved ones are being brought here today from the Red Cross hospital.

The woman then leads the crowd gathered in the square in a chorus of the national anthem. Her voice is soon lost in the multitude, thousands of voices piling up on top of one another, a soaring tower of sound rearing up into the sky. The melody surges to a peak, only to swing down again like a pendulum. The low murmur of your own voice is barely audible.

This morning, when you asked how many dead were being transferred from the Red Cross hospital today, Jin-su s reply was no more elaborate

Han Kang was born in 1970 in South Korea. In 1993 she made her literary debut as a poet, and was first published as a novelist in 1994. A participant in the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, Han has won the Man Booker International Prize, the Yi Sang Literary Prize, the Today s Young Artist Award, and the Manhae Prize for Literature. She currently works as a professor in the department of creative writing at the Seoul Institute of the Arts.

Stunning . . . Han Kang has an ambition as large as Milton s struggle with God: She wants to reconcile the ways of humanity to itself. NPR
 
Human Acts is unique in the intensity and scale of this brutality. . . . The novel details a bloody history that was deliberately forgotten and is only now being recovered. The Nation

Exquisitely crafted. O: the Oprah Magazine

Human Acts speaks the unspeakable. Vanity Fair
 
The long wake of the killings plays out across the testimonies of survivors as well as the dead, in scenarios both gorily real and beautifully surreal. Vulture

Engrossing . . . Unnerving and painfully immediate . . . [Human Acts] is torturously compelling, a relentless portrait of death and agony that never lets you look away. Han s prose . . . is both spare and dreamy, full of haunting images and echoing language. She mesmerizes, drawing you into the horrors of Gwangju; questioning humanity, implicating everyone. Los Angeles Times
 
  Revelatory . . . nothing short of breathtaking . . . What Han has re-created is not just an extraordinary record of human suffering during one particularly contentious period in Korean history, but also a written testament to our willingness to risk discomfort, capture, even death in order to fight for a cause or help others in times of need. San Francisco Chronicle

Where Kang excels is in her unflinching, unsentimental descriptions of death. I am hard pressed to think of another novel that deals so vividly and convincingly with the stages of physical decay. Boston Globe

Absorbing . . . Han uses her talents as a storyteller of subtlety and power to bring this struggle out of the middle distance of history and into the intimate space of the irreplaceable human individual. Minneapolis Star-Tribune

Pristine, expertly paced, and gut-wrenching . . . Human Acts grapples with the fallout of a massacre and