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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Please Look After Mom
Kyung-sook Shin
An elderly mother, So-nyo, lets go of her husband's hand in the crowd at Seoul Station and vanishes, and her grown children search the city for her while confronting how little they ever really knew her. Seoul is the anxious present: the station where she disappeared, the subway and streets papered with her photograph, the children's apartments she was coming to visit. Behind it lies the rural hometown in the far south where she spent her whole hidden life.
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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.
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