Will I love Human Acts?

Kang’s sentences are short and tidy and clearly well-translated into English from Korean, and I was immediately drawn into the novel through the almost staccato rhythms of the prose. A small warning: this story comes with ghosts.

The plot is a fictionalization of a horrific event in Korean history in which soldiers opened fire on thousands of students protesting the 1980 military coup, killing somewhere between 600 and 2,300 civilians. The story was actively suppressed by the Korean government—hence the uncertainty over numbers.

Using this as a backdrop, Kang personalizes the violence and political upheaval of Korea in the 1980s,… show more.

I first became aware of Han Kang through her terrific novel The Vegetarian, so when this novel came out, I was keen to read it. I was especially drawn to it because it involves Korean characters looking back at the Gwangju massacre, a horrific event that took place in 1980, just two years after I left Korea following my Peace Corps service there. When I taught at a university, anti-government demonstrations by students were already being tightly watched, and one of my students vanished in a crackdown. I never learned what happened to him, but he didn’t return to… show more.