Han Kang's denunciation of oblivion

This is the last novel translated into Catalan by the winner of the last Nobel Prize for Literature, South Korean writer Han KangA book that relates to all of the author's books, but especially to Human acts, because it also delves—with as much force as delicacy—into the traumatic past of Korean history. In this case, the bloody episode at the heart of it all is a massacre that took place on Jeju Island, in the northernmost part of the country, in which more than ten thousand people were murdered. It was a true barbarity perpetrated by police and military personnel against a popular uprising of peasants who rejected the division of Korea into two countries. It was 1948, and some historians place this episode as one of the preludes to the Korean War, which began two years later. Needless to say, the entire massacre took place with the knowledge of the US Army, which already controlled the territory.

Han Kang explains a microhistory to bring to light the traumas of History with a capital H. The friendship between two women who have been collaborating for years to make documentaries is the little bit that sparks the plot: the book's narrator receives a message to go help her friend, who is hospitalized. She has cut three fingers while working with wood and asks her to come to her house to save the parakeet she had to leave without food or water when the neighbors took it to the hospital. The journey the narrator takes to get to her friend's house in Jeju, in the midst of a terrifying snowstorm, is only the necessary prelude to adapting body and soul—two entities that, for Han Kang, are almost one and the same—to the tragedy she will discover once she settles into her friend's house and begins.

How can we be so cruel to each other?

The parakeet is dead, of course. It hasn't lasted three days without food or water, and the first thing the narrator does is give it a proper burial, inside a small box under the snow that keeps falling outside, at the foot of a tree. This burial serves as a counterpoint to everything that will follow. The wonderful rocky landscapes of Jeju Island, the beaches and mountains visited by more than four million tourists each year, were the scene of a series of summary executions, during which people were shot in the back and then thrown into the sea. Han Kang is a writer who explores this fundamental division: how can we be so cruel to one another? And how can the same space be the stage for both death and life? How do pain and beauty come together?

The writer works to enable the dead to communicate with the living, not in an esoteric way, but almost in a material way. That's why any bone or human remains, any scrap of paper where someone who is now dead might have written something, is enough to try to tighten the thread and recover their story. What's admirable about this writer is that she addresses themes that no one has addressed before in Korean literature, and she confronts it with a literature that seems to speak only of snowflakes, candles lit in the dark, and golden threads. These are elements that seem soft, and perhaps ill-suited to the harshness of the themes the author addresses, but it is precisely in the tiny space left by hope that Kang encases everything she believes is worth saving: the friendship between two women, the love between relatives who search for each other without anything, not even a bone that perhaps belonged to a dead uncle... All of these are silent engines of a power that far surpasses any hatred.