Hunger by Choi Jin-young Review

Gu and Dam are a couple. Then Gu dies. So Dam eats his corpse. As you do.

What an absolute load of bollocks. I thought Choi Jin-Young was going to do something with her concept of couples’ cannibalism - which is the unusual and macabre angle that drew me to this novella - but she didn’t. The book is instead the boring story of a boring relationship, ending the way it began, to no effect, despite knowing more by the end about the “characters”.

Because the only way I was able to discern between Gu and Dam was remembering that Gu was the dead one and he was the guy, which meant Dam was the girl. Each “character” has their own alternating chapter but they sound exactly the same. Same cadences, tone, inane statements (“What is a human? … Do I want to be human?”, “To suffer is to experience physical or emotional pain. There can be no love without suffering”).

Their story is so unremarkable. They meet in high school, become a couple, then there’s a hiccup in their relationship before they’re reunited but oh no something bad happens. Blah. It’s all so bland and anodyne. It isn’t powerful or romantic - it’s dull, especially with the corny and unimaginative romance-speak spattering the dreary narrative: “Gu was everything” and “I’m trouble. I’m not good for her”.

This book’s being marketed as “The Korean Cult Classic” but can a book be a “cult” if it’s a bestseller and can it be a “classic” if it’s only 10 years old (the English translation just came out this year)? I don’t think so for either.

Hunger is a quick read but who cares when the book is this forgettable, pointless and unenjoyable? Definitely not for anyone hungering for quality fiction.