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Description
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South Korea, May 1980. In the city of Gwangju, as democratic society rises up during an uprising of citizens, students, and workers, which is brutally crushed by the military junta imposed on the country, a boy, a teenager, the fifteen-year-old Dong-ho, is also killed in a horrific way. Centered on his case, this polyphonic novel unfolds through interlinked chapters in order to capture and express collective grief, the victims and their relatives, dead and alive. It is not only his best friend, also tragically lost, but also Dong-ho’s mother who mourns for her child. It is not only an editor who struggles against the regime’s censorship, but also a prisoner, shattered by his experiences, by his thoughts. Everyone here, men and women alike, is wounded by their memories. In Human Acts, a work equally violent and poetic, shocking and tender at once, we follow souls in search of peace. Nobel laureate Han Kang, drawing on a historical event that marked her homeland, celebrates courage and hope.
“In the novel Human Acts, Han Kang uses as the political foundation of her book a historical event that took place in Gwangju, the city where she grew up and in which hundreds of students and civilians were murdered during a massacre carried out by the South Korean military in 1980. Seeking to give voice to the victims of history, the book approaches this atrocity in a similar way and, precisely through this form, comes close to the genre of literary testimony. Han Kang’s style, which is as insightful as it is concise, goes beyond our usual expectations of the genre, and her technique is particularly distinctive in allowing the souls of the dead to separate from their bodies, thus turning them into witnesses of their own annihilation. At certain moments, at the sight of unidentified bodies that cannot be buried, the text evokes the central motif of Sophocles’ Antigone”
Swedish Academy
From the statement accompanying Han Kang’s award of the Nobel Prize in Literature
Manufacturer
- Author
- Han Kang
- Publisher
- Ekdoseis Kastanioti
- Type
- Prose
- Subtitle
- -
- Cover
- -
- Number of Pages
- 208
- Release Date
- 01/06/2026
- Publication Date
- 2026
- Dimensions
- 14x20.5 cm
- ISBN-13
- 9789600375176
Important information
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