Han Kang, _Human Acts_, trans.Deborah Smith

 SPEAKING OF SATISFYING second novels (see yesterday's post on Caleb Crain's Overthrow)...actually, all I know is that this is Han's second novel to appear in English. But I did find it as worthwhile as the Booker-winning The Vegetarian. 

Human Acts is centered around the anti-government demonstrations in Gwangju, South Korea, in 1980, the brutal, even murderous repression of those demonstrations, and the afterlife of the events in the memories of survivors.  Each chapter takes the point of view of a different participant. The first two are set at the time of the demonstrations themselves, the subsequent chapters five, ten, twenty-two, and thirty years later. An epilogue gives us the point of view of Han herself, who was born in Gwangju and whose family had moved away just a short while before the demonstrations; she was just ten at the time.

The characters whose perspectives we get are not leaders or even all that near the center of things; they are volunteers, part of the crowd, with various reasons for being there and joining. Two of them are among the dead; those who survived struggle with memory and trauma, even after the fall and eventual conviction of Chun Doo-hwan, the coup leader who ordered the assault of the demonstrators. The need (or desire or imperative) to remember is continually in a struggle with the need (or desire or imperative) to forget.

The novel has a lot to convey about hope, courage, solidarity, endurance; it also has a lot to say about defeat, suffering, grief, and traumatic memory. It's short, but complex; the interrelationships among the characters are many, but they are rarely spelled out explicitly, so readers need to do some noticing and piecing together on their own. For me, the readerly engagement required made the novel all the more powerful--the gradual realization that I had met the point-of-view characters of Chapter 3 and Chapter 5 back in Chapter 1 became part of the novel's slow reveal of the long-term legacy of the demonstrations, parts of its lesson about the nature of political change.