소년이 온다

Read: Paperback edition published by Granta Books in 2020 / English translation from Korean by Deborah Smith 2016 First published: "소년이 온다", "The Boy is Coming", 2014, by Changbi Publishers, Inc. This is Han Kang's second book I read. First one was The Vegetarian (2007), and they both took my soul and turned it inside out. Han Kang is delicate, intimate, and powerful. Every time I read her (twice) always turns into something memorable and profound. Even though I felt much closer to Yeong-hye, the protagonist of The Vegetarian, and her slow entry into the abyss of her transformation - book that attracted me for its title and its incipit: a woman who begins to grow a deep rejection for the consumption of animal products, and for which I remained glued to the pages until the end, following one of the most feminine stories (in the sense of being a woman) that I have ever read, if not the most, so far -, here, I finally felt something truly Korean. I've seen a lot of Korean stories, films, series, some songs here and there, other books, but every time I have the impression that, often, in Korea are afraid to be... true? It's as if they bury themselves with constructed, written, created, manufactured characters that are not real. And even though it's often beautiful and powerful, I can always sense the detachment. It's fiction, it's just characters. Han Kang makes everything feel real, like it's happened, like it's happening in that moment, and you are there with them, real people, with real pain, deep, true, real struggle. Human Acts takes place during the Gwangju Uprising in 1980. It is not a journalistic story, and therefore it is difficult to understand what happened, what triggered the student revolts of during months if you don't know it already (I didn't), but it is perfectly capable of making us perceive the evil that has resulted from it, the massacres, the deaths, the torture, the atrocities committed by the military. Han Kang does this again, describing the main subject (in this case not a woman but a period) from various points of view: a boy, a woman, a soul, a man. And she doesn't embellish with virtuoso lexical pirouettes, it's simple, understandable, perceptible, sad. Two years ago she won the Nobel Prize for Literature, and while I don't quite understand the weight of this kind of things, I'm sure she deserved it. Han Kang is an evergreen writer who tells timeless stories that speak and will always speak of the present. Whether set in 1980 or 2026, it will always be about today. Beautiful