Han Kang

From the internationally bestselling author of The Vegetarian, a “rare and astonishing” (The Observer) portrait of political unrest and the universal struggle for justice. In the midst of a violent student uprising in South Korea, a young boy named Dong-ho is shockingly killed. The story of this tragic episode unfolds in a sequence of interconnected chapters as the victims and the bereaved encounter suppression, denial, and the echoing agony of the massacre. From Dong-ho’s best friend who meets his own fateful end; to an editor struggling against censorship; to a prisoner and a factory worker, each suffering from traumatic memories; and to Dong-ho's own grief-stricken mother; and through their collective heartbreak and acts of hope is the tale of a brutalized people in search of a voice. An award-winning, controversial bestseller, Human Acts is a timeless, pointillist portrait of an historic event with reverberations still being felt today, by turns tracing the harsh reality of oppression and the resounding, extraordinary poetry of humanity. Shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award Amazon, 100 Best Books of 2017 The Atlantic, “The Best Books We Read in 2017” San Francisco Chronicle, “Best of 2017: 100 Recommended Books” NPR Book Concierge, 2017’s Great Reads Library Journal, “Best Books of 2017” Huffington Post, “Best Fiction Books of 2017” Medium, Kong Tsung-gan’s “Best Human Rights Books of 2017”

A Novel

Human Acts

kemi

we’d all performed the miracle of stepping outside the shell of our own selves, one person’s tender skin coming into grazed contact with another,

I’m waiting. No one is going to come, but still I wait. No one even knows I’m here, but I’m waiting all the same.

mori

I want to see their faces, to hover above their sleeping eyelids like a guttering flame, to slip inside their dreams, spend the nights flaring in through their forehead, their eyelids. Until their nightmares are filled with my eyes, my eyes as the blood drains out. Until they hear my voice asking, demanding, why.

Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.

I forgive no one, and no one forgives me.

Grace McCarter

The trees in front of the Provincial Office are being lashed by the rain. Squatting down on the highest step, the one closest to the door, you think back to your biology lessons. Studying the respiration of plants during fifth period, when the sunlight was always on the wane, seems like something that took place in another world, now. Trees, you were told, survive on a single breath per day. When the sun rises, they drink in a long, luxurious draught of its rays, and when it sets they exhale a great stream of carbon dioxide. Those trees over there, who hold those long breaths within themselves with such unwavering patience, are bending under the onslaught of the rain.

. . . how I longed to extend my trembling fingers to the outer edge of her heart.

🎠

You fix on her eyes, which have become hollow and shadowed, and think, whereabouts in the body is that bird when the person is still alive? In that furrowed brow, above the halo-like crown of that head, in some chamber of the heart?

In an attempt to batten down the rising tide of fear, I thought of my sister. Watching the blazing sun describing an arc farther and farther to the south, staring at my face as though trying to bore through those shuttered eyelids, I thought of my sister, only of her. And I felt an agony that almost broke me. She was dead, she had died even before I had. With neither tongue nor voice to carry it, my scream leaked out from me in a mess of blood and watery discharge. My soul-self had no eyes; where was the blood coming from, what nerve endings were sparking this pain? I stared at my unchanging face. My filthy hands were as still as ever. Over my fingernails, dyed a deep rust by watery blood, red ants were crawling, silent.

We were bodies, dead bodies, and in that sense there was nothing to choose between us. All the same, there was something infinitely noble about how his body still bore the traces of hands that had touched it, a tangible record of having been cared for, been valued, that made me envious and sad. Mine, on the other hand, crushed out of shape beneath a tower of others, was shameful, detestable. 

As she silently chewed the grains of rice, it occurred to her, as it had before, that there was something shameful about eating. Gripped by this familiar shame, she thought of the dead, for whom the absence of life meant they would never be hungry again. But life still lingered on for her, with hunger still a yoke around her neck. 

Human Acts quotes

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