If you die before me, I'll eat you. That's the only way that I can keep living.

Ode to what is left after love

Choi Jin-Young's Gu's Proof ponders the meaning of life and death through the grief and mourning process that follows the sudden death of a lover. Choi's lucid prose and keen sensibility provide the perfect backdrop for the passionate love and tragic ending that awaits the youthful protagonists in this paean to undying affection.

Love beyond imagination, and the imagination that makes such love possible

Enter a woman and a man. Perfectly ordinary people to others, to each other they are irreplaceable. How to describe their kind of relationship? One might call it fate, or by the more pedestrian name of lovers, but the two protagonists, Gu and Dam, exist somewhat outside of that category. Some might say they have gone too far, while still others might counter that theirs is the most perfect love of all. Tragedy, unfortunately, is about to strike. The death of one's lover, inescapable and irrevocable. This is where the novel starts: by discovering the body of their loved one, reaffirming that they are gone for good.

Dam's low voice as she sits next to the prone Gu, who lies dead in the streets, is as empty as only those who have known such grief. Her unfocused eyes seem to be gazing at something far away from reality. That is when she begins to gnaw at the body in front of her. The fact that she is consuming human flesh means less to her than the reason driving her to do it. To her, the present is dead. There is only the past. Dam's time has stopped with the death of her lover. Told in the present tense, her narration is frozen in time when they were still together. The novel slowly moves back to their past. Eating Gu, Dam is able to remain in that time. By consuming Gu, she is able to consume his time, to swallow their past together whole. A rite performed by the living for the dead. In this way, Dam pays her respects to Gu, for now he will never die but live on inside of her.

There is no other name for it than love.

Extreme as it may be, it is love.

For some, it forms the nucleus of their lives. They cannot be buffeted by the travails of life; they remain standing upright in the middle. Is theirs a tragic fate? An incomparable folly? But these two, however, are no different from us. They might very well be someone we know, just another Gu and Dam loving and living like anyone else. This novel is not about an extraordinary kind of love, but the kind of love that all of us recognize and have experienced. When the light goes out of our loved one's eyes, what kind of face will we make? Can anyone truly say they are prepared in the face of loss, to be the one left behind?