Human Acts

“Why are we walking in the dark, let's go over there, where the flowers are blooming.”

4.5/5⭐

If, like me, you’ve never heard of the Gwangju Uprising in South Korea in the 1980s, this is a must read.

The event was a terrible display of tyrannical power and absolute cruelty.

But this book begins with the aftermath, as we reckon with the carnage and corpses left behind.

The book jumps from character to character over the next thirty years, as they each reckon with the horrors they experienced.

We get chapters from bereaved loved ones, frightened students, and even the soul of a murdered boy who wrestles with what it means to be dead and, most confusing of all, why he had died in the first place. Why had his government killed him? Why had the soldier pulled the trigger?

The driving question of this book, though, is simple: are humans inherently 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?”

A terrifying thought, and one that will stay with me for a long time after setting the book down.

In terms of the writing, it was spectacular. The prose was poignant and heartbreaking and unflinchingly exact, even when describing horrors beyond imagining.

The only drawback was the choice to write in 2nd person for portions of the book. It seemed an attempt to make us as readers (the “you” in 2nd person) feel intimately involved in the experiences of Korean citizens at that time, but it missed the mark because 2nd person is so jarring.

It pushed me back from immersion instead of drawing me in, which, with a book this gut wrenching, may have been a blessing in disguise.

Underline-worthy quotes:

“After you died I could not hold a funeral, and so my life became a funeral.”

“Soundlessly, and without fuss, some tender thing deep inside me broke. Something that, until then, I hadn't even realized was there."