RaveThe New York Times Book Review\"Han is smart to focus not on the gruesomeness of Dong-ho’s work — which would be redundant, melodramatic and expected — but on its mundanity ... In essence, we witness the impossibly large spectrum of humanity, and wonder how it is that one end could be so different from the other. To explore that spectrum, the book’s polyphonic structure comes across as necessary and natural. Each chapter offers a piercing psychological portrait of a character affected by the Gwangju massacre ... shows Han’s imaginative and meaningful obsession with violence upon the body. It also reveals another, perhaps more fundamental, obsession: dissonance. Each chapter explores what happens when two seemingly dissimilar or even opposing elements try to coexist: when innocence is surrounded by violence, when the dead keep on living, when survivors live like the dead, when freed prisoners still feel imprisoned and when the past becomes the present ... It is Han’s graceful ballet along this fine line, artfully replicated in Deborah Smith’s translation, that makes this harrowing book about the Gwangju massacre compulsively readable, universally relevant and deeply resonant ... Human Acts is, in equal parts, beautiful and urgent. Though it might not have been Han’s intention, her novel reads not only as a lyrical post-mortem on violence but also a call to counter that violence.\
