The South Korean writer Han Kang came to prominence among English-speaking readers with The Vegetarian, a creepy tale of a self-starving housewife, which won this year’s Man Booker international prize. Human Acts, the second of her novels to be translated into English by Deborah Smith, has a broader sweep, drawing on a brutally suppressed student protest in Han’s native city of Gwangju in May 1980, when the author was nine. But it’s not a work of straight realism; this sometimes ghostly narrative is elliptical and self-conscious about the difficulty of accounting for the legacy of state violence.
When the novel begins, South Korea is under martial law. The first chapter introduces us to Dong-ho, a 15-year-old schoolboy around whom later episodes orbit. He’s searching anxiously for his friend Jeong-dae among the savagely mutilated dead bodies that are piling up in a gymnasium being used by demonstrators as a makeshift mortuary. Han describes minutely (and overwhelmingly) the grim sights and smells as Dong-ho joins the volunteers tending to the dead.
Later chapters unfold over subsequent decades and follow the uprising’s traumatised survivors, including a book editor hassled by censors for publishing the text of a topical play and a jailed protester recalling his experience of starvation. Han writes in the first person, the second and the third; one segment is narrated by a dead boy’s soul, floating over his own body, describing the exercise regime he won’t be able to follow and the girls he’ll never meet. Some particularly horrific passages describe the torture that a woman finds herself unable to recount when she’s interviewed by an academic about her memory of the protests.
The final section follows “the writer”, who, as a child, overheard grownups whispering about the violence. In adulthood, she’s compelled to research the massacres and pay tribute to the victims. How best to do that is the problem this challenging novel confronts. If Han’s in-your-face description of maimed and wounded bodies is partly a way to militate against forgetting or covering-up of the kind “the writer” discovers on a visit to Gwangju in 2013, it also has surprising local effects. When, late in the novel, long after Dong-ho’s death, his mother recalls his sour-smelling puke and the “strangely sweetish scent” of his nappies as a baby, the contrast is poignant.
Human Acts is published by Portobello (£8.99). Click here to buy it for £7.37
