Human Acts

With Han's The Vegetarian awarded the 2016 Man Booker International Prize, her follow-up will garner extra scrutiny. Bottom line? This new work, again seamlessly translated by Smith, who also provides an indispensable contextual introduction, is even more stupendous. Han drops readers into a mass of deteriorating corpses, the victims of South Korea's 1980 Gwangju Uprising, when student-led demonstrations came to a gruesome end. A 15-year-old boy, searching for his missing friend, enters a school where bodies are being collected and doesn't leave alive. In the five chapters that follow, using Rashomon-like shifts in perspective, Han bears witness to what happened in that death-filled building and the hellish aftermath over decades for those who got out. Han, a Gwangju native, adds her own urgent history in the epilog, erasing any remotely comforting distance the word novel might have provided.