Han Kang - Human Acts
I finished reading this about 24 hours ago and I've been trying to figure out how to write about it ever since. I still haven't quite got there but I know that if I don't do it now I'll forget to do it at all, so here I am.
Han Kang is one of those writers who it feels like everybody has been aware of except for me. The Vegetarian appears to have been something of a phenomenon that completely passed me by, and it wasn't until she was awarded the Nobel Prize earlier this year that I first heard of her. Proof again, as if it was needed, that nobody can know everything.
Since the Nobel win I've read a couple of her short stories (I especially liked "Heavy Snow", which appeared in The New Yorker in November) and, now, Human Acts. I've liked it all enough that I'm going to make a point of seeking out the rest of her work, and I have a request out on NetGalley for her upcoming novel We Do Not Part.
Human Acts, then. Kang's writing - or the prose of the translation, at least; I'm growing increasingly aware of the fact that every piece of translation is functionally a piece of new art whose existence is founded in another piece of art - is sparse and beautiful, which makes a stunning juxtaposition against the actual subject matter of the novel, which is brutal an unflinching in its depictions of state violence and the brutal violation of the bodies of many of the main characters.
It's interesting to contrast the violence and the horrific acts in this book to some of the so-called "extreme horror" that I've read (including the book I read immediately prior to this, Jo Quenell's The Mud Ballad). They're obviously very different books in terms of genre and subject matter, but I do think there's some crossover here because lots of extreme horror deals very directly with incredibly acts of incredible violence and transgression being inflicted upon its characters. The Mud Ballad contains scenes of violence towards children; depictions of festering, infected wounds; scenes of characters being forced to engage in acts that they don't want anything to do with. All of this is present in Human Acts, too, as well as some really quite harrowing torture scenes that include starkly-related sexual violence. And what I find interesting is that in extreme horror, where the aim is to make you feel uncomfortable, unsettled, and probably quite upset, I generally don't respond to those scenes at all. These books seem to revel in the depravity and I find it all just falls flat and feels a little juvenile, and it has no real impact on me.
Contrast that with Human Acts. The violence on display here is brutal and shocking. The book doesn't wallow in it or take any joy in it, but neither does it flinch away. Everything is related with an almost detached starkness that makes it hit much, much harder than anything I've read in horror. There are sections in Kang's novel that I found genuinely hard to read because they seemed real. I watch and read a lot of horror and an generally unshockable, and in reading this I couldn't help but think about the fact that the most uncomfortable I've ever felt while watching a film is during the scenes featuring real animals in Cannibal Holocaust. Something about the heightened fictional nature of horror makes the violence meaningless to me, but Human Acts is so firmly rooted in reality that it suddenly became real - and that made it powerful.
One of my goals in the coming year is for at least 50% of the fiction I read to be in translation. I'm definitely going to make an effort to include more of Han Kang's work in that, because this was fantastic and I know I'll be thinking about it for a while.