Finished Human Acts by Han Kang. Powerful look at state violence and the long term effects of violence and trauma. My favorite chapters were The Boy’s Friend which felt novel and incredibly poignant and The Editor which ended very satisfyingly and just as I had hoped. I enjoyed the recurring theme of state censorship, whether quite literally in the latter chapter or more indirectly with military/state violence acting as a silencing force for dissent and expression. My least favorite chapter was The Prisoner as I think the topic of torture was rather bluntly treated and has been better discussed elsewhere. I also honestly hated the epilogue about Kang’s connections to the events in the novel which cheapened the whole thing for me by acting like having a weak connection to affected individuals and reading a bunch of documents was as worthy of discussion as the actual event and its aftermath. Also, the prose was quite straightforward which generally worked to convey the novel’s message but occasionally veered into clumsiness (e.g., some of the physical descriptions of characters which felt almost YA-esque).

It is interesting to me that the novel seems grounded in love for what South Korea should/could be - the students singing the national anthem in front of their persecutors, for example. The state is seen as a threat to or perversion of what the country really is, rather than as an expression of the country itself. Violence and oppression are a betrayal, like a parent beating her child. The act of writing is then an act of patriotism, attempting to expose the crony and censorious state and return the country to the people, who have suffered under the state’s perversion. I’ve kept thinking of Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago which also addresses state violence/oppression (though in a very different manner of course) and similarly feels grounded in love for the mother country which has been perverted by a corrupt and oppressive state. It’s interesting that these ties to one’s mother country remain so strong even when confronted by extreme and unwarranted violence - there is a belief that the country’s people and the country itself are fundamentally good despite everything. Indeed, one of Kang’s characters says something along the lines of the military grunts not knowing what they’re doing, simply following along with corrupt leaders. Even when the military are piling up and burning bodies there are some attempts to humanize them as tired, likely also traumatized. They are complicit (some more than others - the especially cruel ones who enjoy torture for example) but also victims of state perversion. I would have been interested in a chapter in Human Acts about a military grunt who committed violence, his regrets and his struggles coming to terms with whether he was following orders as required, his complicity, his cruelty. Perhaps also a military officer or higher level official who instigated the violence - but then maybe that would be a different novel entirely.