Book Review: Human Acts is a book on a mission, giving evidence, bearing witness, creating meaning, testifying to the effects of the brutal suppression of a student and worker uprising in which the human suffering had a half-life of decades. This is not reportage. This is a memory that refuses to be forgotten. Like some unholy mix of Solzhenitsyn and Lincoln in the Bardo, everything is told through human cost, emotion, loss, pain, guilt, anger. "Why I'm still alive?" Han Kang brings everything to the most fundamental level, real, human, into the physicality of bodies: torn flesh, ripped intestines, flowing blood. The war repeated, but this time South Korean soldiers sadistically killed South Korean workers and students. Human Acts tells the actual physical effect of broken bodies and broken minds on broken people, but the suffering existed not only in three dimensions, but in the fourth as well, in real time, as the horrendous legacy is felt over decades, continually and increasingly destructive for these damaged people. Han is determined to carefully express the hurt, and does so through a web of interrelated people, alive or dead, all victims of the massacre. An important book, a telling moment, as the book notes such events occurred in the New World and in Bosnia. This unique story is not unique to Korea. Think of Warsaw, the Khmer Rouge, the Egyptian Spring, and so many others. Moments of meaning and finality. Han says: "There is no way back to the world before the torture. No way back to the world before the massacre." This a book to cause pain and tears. But for me the most touching moment is when Human Acts tells of the mothers of the dead, finally taking their voice. [4★]
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