Book Review: Human Acts by Han Kang

Reviewed by Ann Beman

Human Acts
A Novel by Han Kang
Hogarth, January 2017
$22; 224 pp.
ISBN-13: 978-1101906729

In May 1980, student demonstrations set off a popular uprising in Gwangju, South Korea. Government forces responded with bullets, beatings, and ruthless brutality. Whether or not you are familiar with the Gwangju Uprising, Han Kang’s latest novel will give you a sense of witness to the historic massacre, and an echo of the victims’ voices. Human Acts, a novel in linked stories, opens in the midst of this. While searching for his best friend, 15-year-old Dong-ho falls in with a group of volunteers tending to the bodies of slain protesters. He keeps a ledger, noting details of each corpse, assigning each a number, in order to help family members claim their loved ones. Eventually becoming a casualty himself, Dong-ho serves as the nucleus for the novel, which is divided into seven parts, with each part focused on a different character and told in a different point of view within different timeframes, ranging from 1980 to 2013.

In the first part, Dong-ho’s story is told in second person: “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?” The second part opens in the intimate second person plural voice of a soul lingering at its corpse: “Our bodies are piled on top of each other in the shape of a cross.” In the final acts, Dong-ho’s mother offers her reflections in first-person, as does the author herself in the epilogue: “I remember only the expressions on their faces; the struggle to get through the story while having to skirt around the most gruesome parts; the awkward, drawn-out silences. However many times the subject was changed to something a little lighter, the conversation always seemed to circle back around to that initial, unspoken center.”

Within the novel’s shifts, some events repeat multiple times, but the varying perspectives and time distances reveal facets. It’s as if we’ve witnessed the ripples in the pond that is this event, from thrown stone to the buffets of each wave. And Han Kang shows us that the water has yet to calm. Read this book and marvel at how such spare, lyrical language can illuminate such brutal matter. Read it to grapple, for the first time or again, with the riddle that Gwangju poses: how can two defining yet paradoxical human acts — violence and dignity — coexist?

Ann Beman has been writing a book about thumbs forever. LAR’s nonfiction editor lives in California’s Sierra Nevada with her husband, two whatchamaterriers and a chihuahua in Kernville, on the Kern River, in Kern County (cue the banjoes).