Through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the surest way to the communion table in a Scottish parish was a small piece of lead. The elders judged which of their members were qualified, by belief and by conduct, and handed each of those a token, round or square or oblong, stamped with the name of a parish, a verse or a symbol such as the burning bush. The token was the price of admission. Wikipedia reports that more than five thousand types have been recorded in Scotland, and museums still show them in cases, which is a curious afterlife for an object that once settled who belonged. I have been thinking about that arrangement, in which belonging is certified by something small enough to lose, since I finished a Korean novel last week and have not managed to put it away.
The novel is Choi Jin-young's Hunger, which appeared in Seoul in 2015 under the title 구의 증명, Guui Jeungmyeong, usually rendered as Proof of Gu. Soje's English version reached British readers in 2025 and American readers this May, from Europa Editions. The change of title is instructive. The Korean names the man who is dead, and the English names the condition of the woman who is not. The word for proof, as I understand it, is the one a Korean schoolchild meets in a geometry lesson, where a chain of steps must end in the thing one was asked to show. A book that borrows the word has promised to arrive somewhere, and the destination is not one that most readers will want to be taken to.
I put this book off for most of a year, as one does with a reputation that arrives ahead of the text. A novel announced by its most extreme event tends to be read for that event alone, and I had no wish to read it so. What changed my mind was the pattern of the more thoughtful reviews, which spend most of their length on debt, class and grief and only a few lines on the act itself. When a book's readers keep returning to its ledger, the ledger is probably where the book lives.
I should say plainly what the book turns on, since every review does and a reader deserves to know. When Gu is killed, his partner Dam takes his body home, and the act she then performs is cannibalism. That is the only time I shall use the word. Neither the novel nor an honest essay about it is served by dwelling on the thing itself. The Complete Review observes that the book does not present the act as a spectacle, and Hwang Dong-hee, writing in the Korea Herald, says it is less about the act than about why a person might feel driven across such a line. Both remarks seem to me exact. I shall follow them and ask the question instead.
The answer begins with money, and it begins before Dam and Gu are grown. Mrs Gillespie, a neighbour of mine who advises people on their debts for a living, tells me that the sentence she hears most often across her desk is 'I did not know it was mine.' It comes from the daughter whose late father's credit account turns up after the funeral, from the young man who put his name to an uncle's loan as a favour, and from the widow who learns at last what the house was borrowed against. According to the reviews, the two meet as children of eight and understand almost at once that they belong together. Dam is brought up by an aunt who later dies. Gu's parents vanish and leave him their debts, and the lenders, loan sharks of the old and unlovely kind, simply transfer their attention to the son. It is Mrs Gillespie's sentence again, with a boy at the desk. Their youth is spent in the sort of poverty that is not dramatic but cumulative, made of small thefts, shame and the price of everything. ArtReview adds that schooling, connections and cosmetic surgery are all things this society sells, and that the pair can afford none of them.
The form of the book is the second thing to notice. It is told in short, untitled sections that alternate between the two of them, so that the reader is handed one consciousness and then the other. Gu speaks from beyond death. He can watch Dam, and she cannot hear him, which means that the two voices run side by side like rails and never cross. The Complete Review reads them as parallel monologues, and the phrase seems fair. Few books make a formal point so cruelly. The dead man is permitted to see everything and to say nothing that anyone will receive, and the living woman is permitted to say anything at all to a room that cannot answer.
Then there is the promise. When the Korean press ran a feature on the novel in 2023, it quoted the sentence that gives the story its engine, a childhood vow that if one of them died first, the other would take the body into herself and so go on living. I paraphrase because the exact words are not mine to lift. Children say such things without knowing that they are drafting a contract, and what the novel does is hold the survivor to it. In a story about people crushed by agreements they never made, there is a hard symmetry in giving them one they chose.
One question hangs over that vow, and any reader will feel it. A promise made by two children is not consent in any sense a court would recognise, and the dead cannot renew it. Whether Gu's sections endorse what Dam does, I shall leave to the reader, since the point of reading the book is to meet that voice at first hand. I will say only that the structure makes the question unavoidable. Love in its most absolute form is also a form of confidence about what another person would have wanted, and a novel that puts both parties on the page, one of them silent to the other, is a novel that knows it.
Return, then, to the lead token. The table in Choi's novel is fenced as well, but the elders are creditors and the tokens are money. The table here is fenced by money, and Dam is the guest who does not wait to be admitted. Whoever cannot pay is turned away from nearly everything a society offers, from schooling to the connections that go with it. In this reading, what Dam performs is a communion taken without a token. The publisher's own summary says that she refuses to submit to law, religion or money, and I cannot improve on the shape of that sentence. It is a refusal in three parts, and the third is the one that has been quietly running her life.
I distrust allegory that fits this neatly, and the book has reviewers who share the worry. The Complete Review gives it a B, finds the love between the pair convincing, and thinks the extremes a little much. Its critic wonders whether the novel might have been stronger had it committed to the premise without reservation. Booklist, in April of this year, called it an anti-love story that condemns a system failing its young. Both judgements can stand. The political reading is true, and it explains the book's energy. It does not explain the tenderness, and the tenderness is the part that cannot be argued with.
English readers have met the wish before, in a house on a Yorkshire moor. In chapter twenty-nine of Emily Brontë's novel, Heathcliff tells Nelly Dean that he dug at Catherine's grave on the night of her burial, and that he later had the sexton help him open the coffin. He has also bribed the man to pull away the side of his own coffin in due course, so that he and Catherine may lie together. It is the same refusal to let death settle the account. Heathcliff, though, is by then a man of property, and his love has been tangled for years with acquisition. A man with an estate can arrange his own churchyard. A woman with debts and a dead partner has a room, a table and her own body, and these are all that Choi's novel allows her.
Han Kang's The Vegetarian is the other book that the reviews keep reaching for, and the pairing is a fair one. Both are Korean novels in which a woman answers the appetite of her society with her own mouth. Han Kang's heroine refuses to eat, and Choi's heroine insists on it, and each is answering a country that has treated its young as something to be used up. ArtReview adds Parasite to the company, observing that Bong Joon-ho's film takes the wide view of class violence while Choi keeps to two people. That is a good distinction. A wide view makes an argument. A narrow one makes a person, and a person is harder to dismiss.
What the prose does with this material is the other half of the achievement. A reviewer in South Africa's BusinessDay says that Soje's translation keeps the clipped rhythm of the original, and the economy shows on every page. A Korean newspaper feature credits Choi's fiction in general with breathing an affirmation of life into sorrowful subjects. I find that I agree, though I should not like to have to defend the paradox. Choi writes short sections and lets the white space do the rest. A novel with this subject could easily have been written as a gothic, with the camera lingering. This one is written as a conversation between two people who never stop speaking to each other.
My own reservation is a practical one. The book is hard in a particular way, which is that it lets grief arrive as logic. Someone in the first months of a loss may not wish to have that logic offered with such fluency. That is no reason to stay away from it. It is the reason the book works, and persuasiveness of this kind is both its danger and its gift, so it seems proper to name the two together before recommending it to anyone.
'Cult classic' is a label that publishers wear like a medal, and I am usually suspicious of it. Here the evidence is of a slow rise. The novel appeared in 2015 and sold, in the Korean press's own account, by word of mouth, reaching about 150,000 copies by 2023. A revised edition followed in the publisher's numbered series that year, and the English editions came a decade after the first. Books that spread in that way tend to be answering something. What this one answers, I think, is a sentence heard across a great many desks.
The lead token was a small thing, and I can still see it lying in the palm, as plain as a coin. The elders who handed it out were, within their lights, keeping order, and I would not wish to caricature them. Nobody handed Dam a token, and no creditor would have. She knows exactly what is hers, and the whole of the book is her refusal to hand it over.
Recommended Resources
☞ English Edition: Hunger, Choi Jin-young (translated by Soje), Amazon
☞ Purchase (Korean Edition): Guui Jeungmyeong (구의 증명), Choi Jin-young, Aladin Bookstore
'Ex Oriente, Lux.'
— James L. Fleming, Edinburgh
※ Published under the author's editorial persona. See the About page for how this comes to be.
Sources
- Yoojin Grace Wuertz, review of Hunger by Choi Jin-young, ArtReview, 30 July 2025.
- The Complete Review, Hunger by Choi Jin-young (summary, assessment and press quotations), complete-review.com.
- Europa Editions, Hunger by Choi Jin-young (publisher's description and review extracts), europaeditions.com.
- Wikipedia, Communion token (Scottish tokens and the admission to communion).