Admirers of the South Korean novelist Han Kang are already familiar with the savage, poetic images she uses to write about somatic and spiritual violence. In her Man Booker International Prize-winning novel, The Vegetarian, a housewife who renounces both meat and her own body (she wants to be a tree) is force-fed pork by her father and lusted after by her arborphiliac brother-in-law.
In Han’s next book, Human Acts, she described the violent suppression by the Korean military dictator Chun Doo-hwan of the 1980 student uprising through the eyes of a carousel of narrators: a boy seeking his friend in piles of corpses, a murdered boy’s mother making herself a shrine and a dead boy’s lost soul sensing “as a physical force, our existence in the mind of another”.
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