The seven chapters of Human Acts describe the breaking of that unnamed tender thing for seven people. "Soundlessly, and without fuss, some tender thing deep inside me broke," she writes. When her father brings a secret book of photographs of the massacre home, she finds a photo of a mutilated girl. We learn that the author lived in Dong-ho's house before him her family escaped to Seoul by luck. That startling final section slips into nonfiction. His is the first section, followed by six more stories of the victims of Gwangju - including a spirit tethered to a stack of rotting corpses, the mother of a dead boy, an editor trapped under censorship, a torture victim remembering her captivity, and, finally, a writer. When the bodies - the complaints - grow too many, they are moved to the school gymnasium, and there, a boy named Dong-ho looks for the corpse of his best friend. ![]() The bodies are stowed in the hall of the complaints department of the Provincial Office. In 1980, in Gwangju, South Korea, government forces massacre pro-democracy demonstrators. Perhaps hers is the only sane response to the dreadful range of the word human: to renounce it. She starves to "shuck off the human," become a tree rooted deep in the earth, standing high in the woods. Yeong-hye wants to become a plant, so she drinks only water and eats only sunlight. "I'm not an animal anymore," says Yeong-hye, the protagonist of The Vegetarian, Han Kang's Man Booker Prize-winning 2015 novel. ![]() With a sensitivity so sharp that it's painful, Human Acts sets out to reconcile these paradoxical and coexisting humanities. In Human Acts, Han Kang's novel of the 1980 Gwangju Uprising and its aftermath, people spill blood, and people brave death to donate it. Mercy is a human impulse, but so is murder.
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