Google it or, better yet, look at some dramatizations of it on youtube if you want to get more of the facts. Many were left dead in the streets, more wounded, and the rest were rounded up and thrown into prison. The event was later refeed to as The Gwangju-Massacre, and it truly is one of the most disturbing acts of violence in the twentieth century. When a crowd of student protestors took hold of a Korean city in the 1980s they were gunned down, beaten and just about obliterated by the government forces that occupied the area. And herein lays the brilliance of such writing. We see the devastation the event has caused, but only ever catch glimpses of it itself. However, we only get the aftermath of such butchery. This book is brutal and uncompromising it begins with a flourish of blood and barbarity that is fast and unexpected. Something that, until then, I hadn't realised was there.”

Soundlessly, and without fuss, some tender thing deep inside me broke. “I still remember the moment when my gaze fell upon the mutilated face of a young woman, her features slashed through with a bayonet. From Dong-ho's best friend who meets his own fateful end to an editor struggling against censorship to a prisoner and a factory worker, each suffering from traumatic memories and to Dong-ho's own grief-stricken mother and through their collective heartbreak and acts of hope is the tale of a brutalized people in search of a voice.Īn award-winning, controversial bestseller, Human Acts is a timeless, pointillist portrait of an historic event with reverberations still being felt today, by turns tracing the harsh reality of oppression and the resounding, extraordinary poetry of humanity. The story of this tragic episode unfolds in a sequence of interconnected chapters as the victims and the bereaved encounter suppression, denial, and the echoing agony of the massacre. In the midst of a violent student uprising in South Korea, a young boy named Dong-ho is shockingly killed.

From the internationally bestselling author of The Vegetarian, a rare and astonishing ( The Observer) portrait of political unrest and the universal struggle for justice.

The vegetarian han kang sparknotes