Human Acts by Han Kang

Twenty years lie between that summer and now. Red bitches, we're going to exterminate the lot of you. But you've turned your back on all that. On spat curses, the abrupt smack of water against skin. The door leading back to that summer has been slummed shut; you've made sure of that. But that means the way is also closed that might have led back to the time before. There is no way back to the world before the torture. No way back to the world before the massacre.

In 1980, the South Korean military brutally put down a student protest at Chonnam University in the city of Gwangju. Han Kang's novel Human Acts focuses on the victims of what's now known as the "Gwangju Massacre," centering on the killing of a middle school-aged boy named Dong-ho. The novel is arranged as a series of discrete stories loosely related to Dong-ho's killing, arranged chronologically so that they move bit-by-bit from the moment of the massacre to its aftermath and the possibilities of its memory; they include an editor facing the censorship of a new translation, a woman struggling with whether to tell the story of her rape and brutalization to an academic, and even Dong-ho's mother, who struggles decades after to make sense of her son's death.

Some of these stories are better than others. My favorite was actually the second chapter, which is narrated by the ghost of Dong-ho's friend, Jeong-mi, as he follows his body as it is disposed of by the military authorities. (Jeong-mi, one might think, would dispute the characterization of Human Acts that it begins with Dong-ho's death; the fact that Dong-ho faces the death of his friend before his own only emphasizes the persistence of the brutality that Han describes here.) Han describes Jeong-mi as only dimly aware of the other ghosts that cling to other bodies, and not able to interact with them; in death he is isolated and alienated, the possibility of solidarity rent asunder, as the military no doubt intends when they move to commit violence against a group of children and youths. Jeong-mi's chapter follows the first, which is set in a large warehouse where volunteers arrange the bodies of those killed so that they might be identified by their family. This, too, Han tells us, is a "human act," this regime of courage and care, as much as the atrocities.

Han keeps her focus tightly on the victims of those atrocities. The brutalizers in the military remain as faceless and nameless as movie stormtroopers, and Han isn't interested in contextualizing their deeds or giving their perspectives. There's a moral logic to that, but it left me wondering how such brutality was sanctioned in South Korean society; left unexplored, for example, is the way the massacre was justified with a familiar kind of red-baiting that associated the students with communist North Korea. In the place of dramatizing these dynamics, I felt that Human Acts lurched into a kind of history-book exposition that isn't entirely redeemed by authorial smoothing ("Through the newspapers, you witnessed the seemingly inexorable rise of Chun Doo-hwan, the young general who had been the former president's favorite...") Han is too skilled and too careful to veer into a sentimentalism about the power of the human spirit, or the importance of social memory, but my lasting impressions of Human Acts remained rather circular: brutality, in the end, is brutal. Oh, and I really hated the second person point-of-view that most of the book uses.