Ghost Story

A Nobel winner's latest novel mines Korea's bloody past.

- ROBERT RUBSAM

HAN KANG IS A private person. When she won last year's Nobel Prize for literature, it was widely reported in the South Korean press that she was married to the literary critic Hong Yong-hee. They have actually been divorced for years. She has written very little about herself, and while many characters and protagonists share aspects of her life story-the writer-narrator of 2017's Human Acts learns about the 1980 Gwangju Uprising, in which around 2,000 students and workers were massacred by the South Korean army, from a hidden book of photographs just as Han did-these details do not so much illuminate the author's life as establish a novelistic consciousness to be invaded and deformed, again and again, by the surrounding world.

Han’s writing is distinguished by this contentious marriage of soul and body, an abstract corporeality that places as much emphasis on physical humiliations—headaches, stomach cramps, bullet wounds—as the realm of dreams, hallucinations, and wandering spirits. Human Acts narrates the Gwangju Uprising and the long tail of its suppression by fracturing the narrative perspective, telling the story from the point of view of a young boy, a torture victim, and a soul clinging to its slaughtered body. By locating the military’s crimes on both physical and spiritual levels, Han refuses to consign them to the safe distance of history, lending her novel, and the very real story she is telling, the visceral immediacy of a blow and the lingering agony of a wound.