After reading Han Kang’s The Vegetarian, I downloaded Human Acts which I found utterly impressive, hence the separate book review. This book gives connected snapshots of the democratisation uprising that happened in May 1980 in Gwangju, Korea, protesting a coup d’état, and of the savage repression that followed. With up to 2000 victims. (I was in my first year at the university at the time and cannot remember the news reaching me, despite being politically active, maybe because this was the year of the US Embassy take-over in Tehran and of the boycott of the Moscow Olympics.) The book is organised around the deaths of neighbours and the impact on their relatives until now. The style is strongly original, with bouts of magical realism like the thoughts of a cadaver inside a pile of corpses gathered by the military forces. The stories are all written from a character’s viewpoint, expressing her or his reasoning for joining the uprising and facing a probable death. I found these texts remarkable and highly moving in producing reconstituted motivations from “everyday” people, with no political agenda but an raw urge to recover democracy after decades of dictature. The original title is A boy comes (소년이 온다), which refers to the initial(isation) story, but the later Human Acts title seems quite appropriate, with its many interpretations and the stress on humanity, despite the horror of the repression.
