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Human Acts
by

Han Kang

Vi's review

Apr 19, 2017

really liked it

bookshelves: 2017-book-challenge, favorites, adult, auto-buy-author, dark, fiction, historical-fiction, history, horror, i-cried

I'm at a loss to find words to aptly describe this book. The Gwangju Uprising was one of the most horrific events of modern history, and I think that this is a book that needs to be read.

I had read and liked Han Kang's previous book The Vegetarian, but I greatly prefer this one. Her beautiful prose combined with the brutal subject matter is an addicting combination, and I highly recommend this to everyone, even if you don't normally read historical fiction.

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Quotes Vi Liked

“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 the single truth: that each one of us is capable of being reduced to an insect, a ravening beast, a lump of meat? To be degraded, slaughtered - is this the essential of humankind, one which history has confirmed as inevitable?”
― Han Kang, Human Acts

tags: human-acts

212 likes

“I still remember the moment when my gaze fell upon the mutilated face of a young woman, her features slashed through with a bayonet. Soundlessly, and without fuss, some tender thing deep inside me broke. Something that, until then, I hadn't realised was there.”
― Han Kang, Human Acts

tags: human-acts, humanity, loss-of-innocence

27 likes

“Glass is transparent, right? And fragile. That's the fundamental nature of glass. And that's why objects that are made of glass have to be handled with care. After all, if they end up smashed or cracked or chipped, then they're good for nothing, right, you just have to chuck them away.
Before, we used to have a kind of glass that couldn't be broken. A truth so hard and clear it might as well have been made of glass. So when you think about it, it was only when we were shattered that we proved we had souls. That what we really were was humans made of glass.”
― Han Kang, Human Acts

49 likes

“This rain is tears shed by the souls of the departed.”
― Han Kang, Human Acts

42 likes

“A soul doesn't have a body, so how can it be watching us?”
― Han Kang, Human Acts

12 likes

“After you died I could not hold a funeral,
And so my life became a funeral.”
― Han Kang, Human Acts

169 likes

“The day I stood shoulder to shoulder with hundreds of thousands of my fellow civilians, staring down the barrels of the soldiers' guns, the day the bodies of those first two slaughtered were placed in a handcart and pushed at the head of the column, I was startled to discover an absence in side myself: the absence of fear. I remember feeling that it was all right to die; I felt the blood of a hundred thousand hearts surging together into one enormous artery, fresh and clean...the sublime enormity of a single heart, pulsing blood through that vessel and into my own. I dared to feel a part of it.”
― Han Kang, Human Acts

32 likes