Nina’s Reviews > Human Acts > Status Update

“I remember feeling that it was all right to die; I felt the blood of a hundred thousand hearts surging together into one enormous artery, fresh and clean ... the sublime enormity of a single heart, pulsing blood through that vessel and into my own. I dared to feel a part of it.”

“I looked on in silence as my face blackened and swelled, my features turned into festering ulcers, the contours that had defined me, that had given me clear edges, crumbled into ambiguity, leaving nothing that could be recognised as me.”

She was dead; she had died even before I had.
With neither tongue nor voice to carry it, my scream leaked out from me in a mess of blood and watery discharge. My soul-self had no eyes; where was the blood coming from, what nerve endings were sparking this pain? I stared at my unchanging face. My filthy hands were as still as ever. Over my fingernails, dyed a deep rust by watery blood, red ants were crawling, silent.

The first boy’s name is Dong-ho. He feels really guilty because he ran away when his friend got shot - Jeong-dae - so he’s helping bereaved families find the corpses of their loved ones. Horrific, graphic descriptions of the bodies etc.

“Her death was every bit as quiet and understated as she herself had been. Something seemed to flutter up from her face, like a bird escaping from her shuttered eyes above the oxygen mask.
You stood there gaping at her wrinkled face, suddenly that of a corpse, and wondered where that fluttering, winged thing had disappeared to.” The first character remembering his grandma