Han Kang: Human Acts

I'm sitting in my room in a psychiatric hospital as I type this, and frankly, I don't have the guts to properly review this book: in fact, I had to stop reading partway through and leave the novel for months before I could finish it. It brings into your soul as no documentary could the horrors of the Gwangju Massacre: over ten days during May 1980, during the military suppression of protest against the increasingly authoritarian government, South Korean students and other civilians were beaten, bayonetted, shot, raped, and tortured.

As I read, I found myself thinking: when a crime is committed by a private citizen, the victim at least knows that the community disapproves. When that crime is committed by the victim's own government, their own people, there is the terrible implication that the community does approve, that the victim deserved what they got. (People who have been the targets of bullying, harassment, and domestic and sexual violence know what it is for a school or a workplace or a legal system to tolerate their abuse.)

Does this mean that justice, if it ever comes, can heal the victims? South Korea has come to acknowledge the atrocities of the Gwangju Massacre, and there have been some prosecutions, but the characters of Human Acts are still damaged, still split off. Like NPR reviewer Annalia Quinn, I thought that Kang's use of the second person was a way of insisting we identify with the victims; but for Eimear McBride, reviewing the book in the Guardian, "You is who people were before the violence and have now become irrevocably exiled from."  The translator, Deborah Smith, abandoned the proposed English titles "Restitution" and "Reparation": "the book was about the impossibility of precisely such things". Perhaps more has been broken than bonds of trust between individual and society; the relationship with the body itself and with the world it lives in has been shattered. In the final, autobiographical chapter, Han Kang describes coming across a photograph of a young woman's mutilated face: "Soundlessly, and without fuss, some tender thing deep inside me broke. Something that, until then, I hadn’t even realized was there."