Human Acts

Gwangju, South Korea, 1980. In the wake of a viciously suppressed student uprising, a boy searches for his friend's corpse, a consciousness searches for its abandoned body, and a brutalised country searches for a voice. In a sequence of interconnected chapters the victims and the bereaved encounter censorship, denial, forgiveness and the echoing agony of the original trauma. Human Acts is a universal book, utterly modern and profoundly timeless. Already a controversial bestseller and award-winning book in Korea, it confirms Han Kang as a writer of immense importance.

About the Author :
Han Kang was born in Gwangju, South Korea, and moved to Seoul at the age of ten. She studied Korean literature at Yonsei University. Her writing has won the Yi Sang Literary Prize, the Today's Young Artist Award, and the Korean Literature Novel Award. The Vegetarian, her first novel to be translated into English, was published by Portobello Books in 2015 and won the 2016 Man Booker International Prize. She is also the author of Human Acts (Portobello, 2016) and The White Book (Portobello, forthcoming 2017). She is based in Seoul. Deborah Smith's translations from the Korean include two novels by Han Kang, The Vegetarian and Human Acts, and two by Bae Suah, A Greater Music and Recitation. In 2015 Deborah completed a PhD at SOAS on contemporary Korean literature and founded Tilted Axis Press. In 2016 she won the Arts Foundation Award for Literary Translation. She tweets as @londonkoreanist.

Review :
Human Acts is a stunning piece of work. The language is poetic, immediate, and brutal. Han Kang has again proved herself to be a deft artist of storytelling and imagery An important and necessary book... a devastating and vital a work of literature A conversation of which we rarely hear both sides: the living talking to the dead, and the dead speaking back This ghostly narrative is elliptical and self-conscious about the difficulty of accounting for the legacy of state violence... poignant [Han Kang's] way of telling about the event of a 10-day insurgency on Gwangju, South Korea in 1980 and its psychological, spiritual and political aftermath opened my eyes to the cruelty and viciousness perpetrated on the youth of that city. Her writing is spare and yet clotted with emotion Han Kang's Human Acts is piercing: an exquisite, painful and deeply courageous account of the 1980 Gwangju massacre Powerful and disturbing... lyrical and chilling Powerful [Han Kang's] way of telling about the events of a 10-day insurgency in Gwangju, South Korea in 1980 and its psychological, spiritual and political aftermath opened my eyes to the cruelty and viciousness perpetrated on the youth of that city. Her writing is spare and yet clotted with emotion Han Kang's Human Acts is no less piercing: an exquisite, painful and deeply courageous account of the 1980 Gwangju massacre An extraordinary novel about politics and torture, about the way we memorialize past wrongs. Deborah Smith's translation is typically lucid and readable Beautiful and brutal... A fearless examination of the state of humanity and the diagnosis isn't good. This is the pitiless kind of novel that burrows into its reader Though there's violence and bloodshed on a large scale in Han's depiction of the Gwangju Uprising, it is the small human movements that I found most vivid. That contrast helped to create the strongest experience of all the books I read this year Raw and beautiful, Han's prose was as contrary as the human acts she described [Human Acts] unblinkingly explores the aftermath of one of the darkest moments in South Korean history... It's written with a clear-eyed exactness that is at times horrifying... Ultimately, this is a harrowing novel that deftly examines human cruelty [A] remarkable novel... A technical and emotional triumph Han Kang's Human Acts, translated by Deborah Smith, gutted me. The language finds ways to dig in and hold you even as you want to turn from the horror depicted Brilliant... Incredibly moving