“FRIDAY RE-VERSO”
“Why did the seasons continue to follow one another for me, while for him time has stopped forever in that May?”
In our minds, as we close the book with a closed throat, mortified by a memory that is now ours too, the echo of the literature professor’s voice when he explained to us the greatness of Primo Levi’s writing: he added nothing, because there was nothing to add. The title itself is an echo of that other, so familiar, “If This Is a Man”: the universality of this pain and of these questions without question marks take us briefly back to the Nobel Prize won by Han Kang, a silent nod of assent shakes our heads. Gwangju, South Korea, May 1980. Ten days of insurrection against the martial law declared by Chun Dao-hwan. A massacre. At best, a little paragraph in our history books.
In the story, the eldest is about twenty years old.
The eldest is about twenty years old.
The eldest is about twenty years old.
In the last pages, the writer tells us about her hand clinging to her heart, as if to hold it together or to check that it is still beating. We read the words of this gesture of love and memory and dignity and we think, with conviction, that the meaning of our reading lies here. “Please, write your book in such a way that no one can ever again insult the memory of my brother.”
It is a successful attempt not to make those boys victims or heroes, but rather, thanks to the microscope of literature, to focus on a piece of history in which the recklessness and courage of those young people, of their irremediably broken lives, led to a greater freedom, far from themselves. We were ready to die. Sometimes, and this is important, this is human, not for the cause, for an ideology, but for a friend, a sister. Han builds a monument to the innocent resisters as if all the fragments of those souls killed, tortured or forgotten had recomposed themselves in a luminous and crystalline tombstone that cannot be riddled with bullets or shattered or silenced.
It is truly complex to do justice to this testimony without appearing pathetic or rhetorical.
We could tell you how Han has assigned different voices and points of view to each chapter; how he used that “you” to give us a close and loving perspective on those lives turned upside down in a moment and forever; we could tell you about that show called “The Suicides of May 18”, recited in silence to make censorship something helpless, insufficient; we could report those few lines of the essay on the behavior of the masses, shapeless creatures that exasperate the individual indifferently for better or for worse.
Instead we will tell you how the survivors, also stuck in that May, do not cry for the violence or for the memory of it but in front of the black line of censorship or the question “what is your favorite food?”; how the “big” of the group told the little ones to go out with your arms raised, they will not hurt you; how none of those armed children knew how to fire a single shot.
Han Kang makes his plain writing a cutter that tears open our closed eyelids, he gives an account of a city, of a historical moment that becomes a living symbol of the horrors that we choose to ignore out of cowardice or survival. He courageously digs to the bottom of the most uncomfortable question of all: what makes us human? And it is the suffering with which he poses this question that gives us the strength to read to the end, to go through the pages shaken by horror but aware that we must remember in order to resist, to “better scale what fills us with terror.”
Recensione di Delis
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Han Kang, Atti umani, Adelphi, Milano, 2017
Original edition: 소년이 온다2014