{"id":303806,"date":"2016-03-31T16:00:00","date_gmt":"2016-03-31T16:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2016\/03\/31\/latest-review-human-acts-by-han-kang\/"},"modified":"2018-04-16T14:09:32","modified_gmt":"2018-04-16T14:09:32","slug":"latest-review-human-acts-by-han-kang","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2016\/03\/31\/latest-review-human-acts-by-han-kang\/","title":{"rendered":"Latest Review: "Human Acts" by Han Kang"},"content":{"rendered":"

The latest addition<\/a> to our Reviews<\/a> section is a piece by J. C. Sutcliffe on Han Kang’s Human Acts<\/em>, published by Portobello Books.<\/p>\n

Here’s the beginning of the review:<\/p>\n

\n

Last year, Han Kang\u2019s The Vegetarian was an unexpected critical hit. Now, it\u2019s just been published in the U.S. and has already received a great deal of positive critical attention. The Vegetarian was a bold book to attempt as an author\u2019s first translation into English, yet Han\u2019s surreal story and the skillful politicization of the characters and events, combined with 2015 BTBA<\/span> poetry judge Deborah Smith\u2019s excellently smooth and poetic translation, meant that the gamble paid off. Human Acts, Han\u2019s second novel to appear in English, is a very different book in terms of content, yet equally composed and controlled.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

In May 1980, shortly after the instatement of dictator Chun Doo-hwan after nearly two decades of Park Chung-hee, the Gwangju uprising began\u2014students\u2019 and workers\u2019 protests against Chun Doo-hwan\u2019s restrictive regime. The uprising was brutally suppressed by the police and the military, and the way the dead were treated, allowed to pile up, unclaimed, was particularly horrific.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

But this novel does not tell a chronological story of the events of the uprising, in the way that Sunil Yapa\u2019s new novel, Your Heart Is a Muscle the Size of a Fist, follows the first day of the WTO<\/span> protests in Seattle in 1999. Both have a cast of characters with different perspectives on the event, but it\u2019s significant that Yapa\u2019s novel includes police\u2014who are presented as fully human\u2014while Han\u2019s does not.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

In the way it reports on the bleak brutality of the police, the army and the government\u2014a brutality that becomes simultaneously both more cruel and more banal as the novel progresses\u2014_Human Acts_ has more in common with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn\u2019s writings about the gulag and the semi-random, quota-filling prisoner-taking methods of the Soviets. There\u2019s the same inevitability, the same horrifying repetition of treatment of people, each with their own remarkably individual stories.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

For the rest of the review, go here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The latest addition to our Reviews section is a piece by J. C. Sutcliffe on Han Kang’s Human Acts, published by Portobello Books. Here’s the beginning of the review: Last year, Han Kang\u2019s The Vegetarian was an unexpected critical hit. Now, it\u2019s just been published in the U.S. and has already received a great deal […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":166,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67456],"tags":[50416,59206,64036,64026,1196,64046,1646],"class_list":["post-303806","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-review","tag-deborah-smith","tag-han-kang","tag-human-acts","tag-j-c-sutcliffe","tag-korean-literature","tag-portobello-books","tag-review"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/303806","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/166"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=303806"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/303806\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":309076,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/303806\/revisions\/309076"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=303806"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=303806"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=303806"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}