Mapped
Human Acts
Han Kang
Gwangju in May 1980, when soldiers moved on citizens who had risen against the dictatorship, and the decades in which the survivors carried what they saw. The map holds to a few blocks of the old city centre, where the militia held the Provincial Hall and the dead were laid out nearby, then reaches north to the cemetery where the killed were buried. Written with restraint: these are real places and real losses, and the notes are ours, not the author's words.
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The Vegetarian
Han Kang
Han Kang's Seoul is a modern city of apartment towers and family duty, where a woman's decision to stop eating meat quietly pulls a marriage and a family apart. The map runs from the couple's flat and the parents' apartment across the two sisters' homes and a video artist's studio, then out to a psychiatric hospital in the wooded mountains on the city's northern edge.
5 places →