Reviews with content warning for Suicide - Atos Humanos

Reviews tagging 'Suicide'

Atos Humanos by Han Kang

120 reviews

claireh6's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? N/A
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.75

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nuii's review against another edition

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challenging dark sad tense medium-paced

4.0

I went in blind, which was my mistake because this isn't sth you just casually read...
It's a very difficult book (lots of graphic descriptions. PLEASE check TW), so brutal, so disgusting and raw...the crime that was commited, the pain and traumas it caused, the lives it had ruined...
Han Kang writes with such haunting intensity yet, at times, there's also sth tender and delicate about it...
The 4☆ is due to the fact that I'm not a fan of this particular structure, where 1 main plot being divided into short stories among a cast. I always find it's disruptive to the flow and the connection toward each characters doesnt go deep enough -BUT- i do get why it was used here and it's a reasonable choice to have a variety of accounts for this (historical) topic.
Overall, I cant bring myself to say I enjoy the book, it feels wrong saying that. But I'm glad I read it eventhough it breaks my heart thoroughly... still much to think about.

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warloujoyce's review against another edition

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4.5

I think something in me cracked when I read this book.

I didn’t know anything about Gwangju before encountering Han Kang’s works. Well, as a BTS fan, I knew that it’s J-hope’s hometown. Then I read about the city’s history.

May 1980: The Gwangju Uprising was a protest against the installment of a military dictator who implemented martial law. A military crackdown led to a massacre of student protesters. Han Kang, the author, used to live in Gwangju and discovered the tragic events as a young girl.

TW: mass death, violence, torture, suicide, sexual abuse

Human Acts starts with a scene showing bodies waiting to be identified by their families. In this story, we follow a boy named Dong-ho, the events leading up to his death, and how it impacts other characters’ lives. Each chapter is dedicated to a different POV—a different lens to view the atrocities that occurred and their lingering nightmare. The last chapter is from the author’s POV.

…that room—had the boy used to spread out his homework on its cold paper floor, then lie stomach-down just as I had? The middle-school kid I’d heard the grown-ups whispering about. How had the seasons kept on turning for me, when time had stopped forever for him that May?

I expected this story to be harrowing, that’s why I postponed reading it. I can see why the content would be desensitizing but as a slow and emotional reader, I absorbed every page and it made me so sad.

Oddly enough, it wasn’t the graphic scenes that wrenched me, though these were unsettling and infuriating.

It was the quiet moments that made me cry: student volunteers tending to the mutilated bodies; kids barely out of school organizing funeral ceremonies; a friend complaining about the functional fountain (because how can the world go back to normal after a horror happened in this site?); a boy looking out for the safety of other kids; a survivor saying he’s worn out; a mother remembering that she buried her youngest with her own two hands; and a writer honoring her people the way she knows how.

I didn’t particularly connect with the characters, but I easily imagined the people that they represented—a friend, a sibling, a peer, or a parent.

Human Acts asks the question, is cruelty our base impulse? It’s saddening to be reminded that it is. This book holds a mirror to our face and makes us look at the evil that we’re capable of, and the pain we can and do inflict on each other. :((

Ok stopping here because this is getting bleaker. Human Acts is powerful but heavy stuff, so I’d recommend it but only in times of enough emotional bandwidth.

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emilosophy's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional sad tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.25

this book was hard to pick up once i put it down. and i had to put it down often because of the graphic or horrifying content that was hard to take in. the writing style was interesting (different POVs, including “you”. though judging by the prose, you sometimes cant tell these are all different people talking, different people’s thoughts. the only one that felt clearly like a different voice was the mother’s pov, written in what i assume to be “dialect” translated over to english). the descriptions of violence, corpses, nightmares, sensations, etc, are extremely vivid and feel real. some chapters/POVs were more engaging than others.

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