Regardless, Kang is bold in her exploration of what a novel can do and be. Many more questions frame the narrative, a lesson learned well from Anton Chekhov, who once wrote that “the role of the artist is to ask questions, not to answer them.” This is usually effective, but the sheer number of questions in the novel can be overwhelming, and the urgency of the narrative falters at such moments.

The title asks from the book’s outset, “What is a human act?” It then proceeds throughout the novel to ask rather didactic questions concerning conscience, compassion, and guilt in the face of the government machine. His life and death become the initiating action of the story’s central narrative, which is focused less on a particular plot and more on the nature of memory, guilt, and the way that survivors memorialize and mourn what happened in Gwangju and how it continues to affect the present. The narrative focuses on the death of a middle-school boy named Dong-ho, whose story opens the novel and stays central to the narrative even after his death, as the point of view shifts each section to the many that either knew him intimately or had volunteered by his side during the massacre. Though the novel is slim and spare, like much of Kang’s work, it is epic in ambition and time scale. The story is told through the point of view of multiple characters who are victims and witnesses of the massacre. The novel centers on the Gwangju Massacre in 1980, when the authoritarian Chun Doo-hwan ordered the military to suppress a democratic uprising in the city of Gwangju using all violent means necessary. And while The Vegetarian was originally published in Korean nearly ten years ago, Human Acts is one of Kang’s most recently written books.

Human Acts is a very different novel from The Vegetarian, Han Kang’s first novel recently published in English to numerous accolades, including the Man Booker International Prize (see WLT, May 2016, 91).

The vegetarian han kang sparknotes