Episode 2: Human Acts by Han Kang

Literary Canon Ball

Introduction

In the second episode of Literary Canon Ball we discuss Han Kang's Human Acts.

Originally published in Korean in 2014 before being translated by Deborah Smith and published in English in 2016, Han Kang’s Human Acts is a story told in seven parts, from seven different perspectives.

At its centre is the uprising and brutal massacre that took place in Gwangju in 1980 in South Korea. The story begins in 1980 with Dong-Ho, a middle-schooler who has found himself working in the makeshift morgue where the bodies of those slaughtered are piled up. From there we pulled to the soul of a murdered boy, to an editor struggling to publish work in the face of government censorship, to a victim of torture recounting their experiences after the uprising to a professor, to a former factory girl and then to Dong-Ho’s mother, almost completing a circle. But it is the seventh, and final, chapter, that of Han Kang herself, whose family moved away from Gwangju before the uprising, that acts as the final piece of this puzzle, the story stretching from 1980 to 2013.

Show Notes:

Human Acts by Han Kang review – solidarity and suffering in the shadow of a massacre

Han Kang: ‘Writing about a massacre was a struggle. I’m a person who feels pain when you throw meat on a fire’

Deborah Smith on translating Han Kang's Human Acts

10,000 hours: Deborah Smith, literary translator

Allie Park interviews translator Deborah Smith

Han Kang's 'Human Acts' is a fractured fictional reckoning with the Gwangju massacre

The Author of ‘The Vegetarian’ Takes On Korea’s Violent Past

'Human Acts' Tries To Reconcile Bloody Human Impulses

What we're reading, watching and listening to:

‘Lincoln in the Bardo’ by George Saunders

‘My Father’s Moon’ by Elizabeth Jolley

‘The Watch Tower’ by Elizabeth Harrower

Penmanship

Master of None

Sleepover

Hermione Granger and the Quarter Life Crisis

Wynonna Earp

Wonder Woman

The Handmaid's Tale

'Ask Me How I Am' a review of Jenny Valentish's 'Woman of Substances' by Kylie Maslen

'Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain' by Leslie Jamison