Human Acts

This book wrecked me. That doesn't happen too often.

Where shall I go? I asked myself.
Go to your sister.
But where is she?
Go to those who killed you, then.
But where are they?

Kang takes on a harsh subject, the Gwangju Uprising in 1980, which left hundreds - possibly thousands - dead. Starting with bodies. Rotting corpses piled high in a school gymnasium, watched over by teenagers who barely know what they're fighting for, wrapping the corpses in the Korean flag for their families (if they're identified), waiting for the soldiers to arrive and put the uprising down for good. The first one we meet is Dong-ho, 15, still in middle school, looking for his friend who was gunned down in the street. Soon he will be dead too. And he will haunt the narrative as Kang follows her characters forward in time, through dictatorship, censorship, torture, prison, democratization, remembrance.

Conscience.
Conscience, the most terrifying thing in the world.

I'd say it's a novel shot through with PTSD, except of course it can't be, since for most of it, the events that kicked it off never officially happened. You can't be post-traumatic if the trauma isn't acknowledge. Things get to fester. Violence erupts - suddenly, now or in memories - sharp, uncompromising, and with very real effects. Seriously, it's a very violent novel, all the more so because Kang doesn't shy away, but she (and her translator) have the story so perfectly in hand it never feels sensationalist or maudlin. She keeps returning to the "you" - the second-person narration, Dong-ho, the kid who only wanted to know what happened to his friend, making the story whirl faster around itself even as the events shrink into the supposed past.

And yet, that's not what really gets me about the book.

Is it true that human beings are fundamentally cruel? Is the experience of cruelty the only thing we share as a species? Is the dignity that we cling to nothing but self-delusion, masking from ourselves this single truth: that each one of us is capable of being reduced to an insect, a ravening beast, a lump of meat?

And she keeps coming back to the other side of it. The people who refused to go home, as misguided as they may have been. The loved ones who cling to something for decades. The townspeople who lined up to give blood even as the troops closed in. The ones who find ways to speak up even when the act of speaking was illegal. Throughout the entire novel, counterbalancing all those putrefying corpses, the question of what a soul might be, just which side of us is the most human. Not necessarily in a religious sense, mind you, but some way of explaining all those acts of kindness and mercy, love and friendship - and their flipsides, guilt, pride, and inability to forgive. Nobody said having a soul, whatever it might be, made life easier. That's the bit that still hurts long after your fingernails have grown back, after all. But still. What are we?

We may be the ones who remember. Who may, or may not, choose to know why we remember.

Please, write your book so that nobody will ever be able to desecrate my brother's memory again.

This book wrecked me.