Love in the Big City (2024)

‘Do you think our lives would look like this if our plans always worked out?’

Young adulthood is a tumultuous time juggling part-time jobs and relationships—neither of which tend to last long—along with school, family, and all the traumas from these that the adult mind is finally starting to unpack. Love in the Big City by Sang Young Park is both comedic and desolating as it explores all these ideas from the mind of a young, queer man living in Seoul. Beautifully translated by Anton Hur (they also translated Cursed Bunny by Bora Chung), this book is bubbling over with personality and the charming prose and excellent dialogue will propel these introspective stories right into your heart. Love in the Big City feels deeply personal and autobiographical, with the narrator (called both Mr. Young or Mr. Park at various times) being a semi-successful short story writer who’s stories of sexual escapades and rough living in the Korean queer scene were awarded for their ‘objective self-judgement,’ which very much describes the honest and upfront narration here. Across four parts, each with their own internal thematic arc, Love in the Big City explores the many different kinds of love one feels, as well as their successes and failures as Sang Young Park delivers a moving account of young life and the difficulties of being a queer man in a world still rife with homophobia.

‘But is love truly beautiful?’ the narrator asks themselves midway through the novel. They have experienced the highs and lows of many types of love and sometimes things just don’t feel optimistic. The young student narrator tends towards quick flings, spending each night with a different man as he and his best-friend, Jaehea, live their early twenties in a hazy bliss of alcohol and strangers beds. ‘My devil, my savior, my Jaehee,’ he muses as he chronicles in hilarious detail their tight-knit friendship with this quirky young woman who once steals a medical model from a hospital when denied an abortion, who keeps her Marlboro cigarettes in the freezer, who is the ‘backup drive of my love life’, but when she eventually marries and moves out of his life, Young begins to feel unmoored. He lives with his mother, with whom he has a fraught relationship and must care for as she undergoes cancer treatment for the second time and has a tragic relationship with an older man. Love, at many times in this novel, does not feel beautiful. And yet the heartbreak often seems part of the beauty, particularly later on.

The difficulty of love, it seems, is a world that refuses to allow the LGBT community to live life on their own terms. Even his older boyfriend, a former student activist who frequently chastises him for wearing brands that bear the flags of Western imperialist nations (he reprimands Young for having bedsheets with a Union Jack on the tag, and it is interesting how, along with Gyu-ho’s mattress later in the book, there is always some sort of tension about a partners bed functioning as a metaphor for the difficulties of relationships), has internalized homophobia and an search history full of articles denouncing a queer lifestyle. Young himself faced ‘forced hospitalization’ by his mother when she discovered him kissing a man and has never accepted his queerness, something that haunts their relationship forever as he only wishes she would apologize.

’suddenly felt that I was owed an apology. From whom? The idiots who blamed homosexuality for every stupid thing? Or the specific idiot next to me for smothering himself in that bullshit and being unable to accept himself for who he was? Or the other idiot who fell for the first idiot, even when he knew the first idiot was an idiot, who fell for him so hard he dug through his computer to know everything there was to possibly know about him? Maybe I was owed an apology from all of the above. Or maybe from none of them.’

Similarly, much of the book revolves around issues of if being publicly “out” is accepted or safe, as are other aspects of young life that are deemed taboo. When living with Jaehee, she tells everyone her roommate is a shy woman.

‘In those days, we learned a little bit about what it was like to live as other people. Jaehee learned that living as a gay was sometimes truly shitty, and I learned that living as a woman wasn’t much better. And our conversations always ended with the same question.
-Why were we born this way?
-Who knows?’

‘An excess of self-awareness was a disease in itself.’

All these social and identity issues play out across the four stories taking Young from his early 20s to early 30s and across multiple relationships. As Sang Young Park mentions in the afterword, ‘”Young,” who narrates the four stories in this book, is simultaneously the same person and different people.’ He explains that the book ‘leans on the past, both on my own personal history and that of many people around me,’ and explains that the author’s voice is not necessarily the same as the author and that we change in different stages of life. This opens up some excellent autofiction territory for the book, and we see the snarky and self-aware Young from many different angles in many different situations.

‘Life had always been eager to fail my expectations, no matter how low I set them.’

A narrative aspect I found to work particularly well is that some events will be briefly mentioned in one story only to be examined at length in a later one. The vacation Young takes with his boyfriend, Gyu-ho, for example, is glossed over in the section about their relationship but the memories of it come flooding back a year later when he is staying in the same hotel on a hook-up with an older business man after their break-up. The authentic remorse where a time and place doesn’t take on a deep emotional resonance until examining it in retrospect was quite impactful and colored the final section of the novel with a somber beauty. ‘That is how my memories of him are preserved under glass,’ he thinks, ‘safe and pristine, forever apart from me.’ The end has a bit of a self-sacrificial feel to it. ‘When you try to have too much, you’re bound to stumble at some point,’ he reflects, and there is remorse for the ways of the world that lead to these stumbles, while also accepting his own hand in having gotten there as well. ‘Bitterness,’ he thinks, ‘my favorite taste in the world.’ It’s a very self-aware and moving novel, and while much of it is quite funny there is also a pervasive melancholia weighing on the tone.

‘I used to feel like I’d been given the whole world when I held him. Like I was holding the whole universe.’

There are some beautiful passages here though, particularly about love. And that is what this book nails so well: that love is both bitter and beautiful and that love comes in many forms. Platonic love, familial love, and self-love as well as romantic love. This novel reads very quickly and the prose and dialogue is very infectious, wonderfully rendered into English by Anton Hur. Love in the Big City is sharp, smart, wickedly funny and it will break your heart and make you glad for it. Is love truly beautiful, he asks and the answer is a bittersweet ‘yes.’

4.5/5

‘I tasted something on his lips that I had never tasted before. The fishy, chewy taste of rockfish. Maybe the taste of the universe.’

Longlisted for Booker Prize International 2022.

Another good choice made by this year Booker prize judges. The novel felt like a brain cleanse after reading Paradais. The themes are not necessary pleasant but the writing style is light and occasionally funny.

I could say that the novel is in fact a collection of 4 stories which happen to have the same main character. The stories follow Young in his 20’s and 30’s as he navigates life as a young gay man living in Seoul. The book begins with the wedding of Jaehee, Young’s best friend and ex-roommate. It becomes the perfect occasion to muse over all the drunken nights they spent together talking about the men in their lives. The other chapters/stories introduce the men most important to Young’s love life. Also, we also share moments from the character’s difficult relationship with his mother. There is sex, lots of alcohol, homophobia, self doubt, regrets, love and breakups. One important character is also “Kylie” who will change Young’s life forever.

"In those days, we learned a little bit about what it was like to live as other people. Jaehee learned that living as a gay was sometimes truly shitty, and I learned that living as a woman wasn’t much better. And our conversations always ended with the same question.
-Why were we born this way?
-Who knows?"

Love in the Big City is a refreshingly frank account of the Seoul queer scene, as told by a fictionalized version of the author, a young gay man in his 20s and 30s. Gay life is depicted in all its contradictions - from joyful freedom and camaraderie to rampant homophobia and alienation. The novel is told in four episodes, each with a different tone and exploring aspects of the narrator’s life. The first and fourth episodes were particularly strong and could stand on their own as excellent short stories.

I appreciated the representation of a queer Korean man living in Seoul, as well as the sensitive rendering of his STI. Beyond that though, I struggled to feel invested in Love in the Big City. Mainly, our protagonist has several romantic relationships with men where I struggled to understand what drew him to these men in the first place. Our main character possesses a distinctly brash voice yet not much else about him – hobbies, particular vulnerabilities aside from general attachment issues, early life experiences – stood out to me, so I couldn’t figure out why he and his romantic partners felt drawn to one another. These romantic relationships also all came across as pretty unhealthy or filled with unresolved miscommunication. While these types of relationships do exist, I didn’t detect any trend toward growth in any of the main character’s relationships nor any growth from the main character himself.

I liked the more rigorous development of the main character’s relationship with his best friend Jaehee as well as his difficult relationship with his mother, though neither of these relationships felt explored to a satisfying level either. The character does a lot of things though his internal exploration felt lacking. In my opinion, a disappointing novel aside from its value in promoting queer representation.

It's so exciting and refreshing reading new fiction which fully represents the complexities of modern gay life. There are romantic moments in “Love in the Big City”, but it certainly doesn't romanticize queer experience. Nor does it wallow in oppression or resentment. Instead it faithfully represents the point of view of a young Korean gay man named Young as he navigates family, friendship and various relationships (some are mere hookups while others are knotty emotional entanglements.) He struggles to complete his education and hold a stable job. Many nights are spent drinking, clubbing or chasing tricks on gay hookup apps. On his first night's leave from compulsory military service “the only three things floating around in my brain were iced Americano, Kylie Minogue, and sex.” He's overweight and aware of where he falls in the pecking order of a cruising culture that classifies men based on superficial physical attributes. His contemporaries have developed more stable jobs and relationships, but he's entirely unapologetic about following his desires and instincts even if it leads to his own undoing. The result is a riveting account of the pleasures and pitfalls of intimacy.

Read my full review of Love in the Big City by Sang Young Park at LonesomeReader

Glad to see this being adapted to the big screen!: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mqYjC...
An impressive, frank debut that effortlessly captures the urban gay experience growing up in Seoul. In four episodes we follow our narrator from his college life to later life and disillusionment. Yet there is ample humor and also tenderness to be found

After Elena Knows this is my favourite from the International Booker Prize 2022 long listed books I read. Interesting how there are three bundles of short stories about gay life on the list and how the theme of mother-child relations is ubiquitous in the nominations of this year.

The banter in Love in the Big City is epic.
Already in the first story the narrator is rather foul mouthed while indulging in his college life, with a different man every night. His good (female) friend does the same, but the trajectories are different.
She marries while the narrator remains single.

The second story focuses on first love and the cancer of the mother of the narrator. Being blind to personal flaws in the period of infatuation is told in a frank and self-deprecating way. It's a sensitive story about an unaccepting mother and a wrong first love, all the while with a struggle with self hate and lack of corporate success in the background.

The titular story was my favorite and tells of a tempestuous relationship, where Kylie (Minogue) serves as a pet name for a HIV infection. Brotherhood in the gay community but also stigma forms a theme here. Informal Korean as a sign of having had sex/intimacy with a person also forms a big part in this tale (which definitely makes me curious for the original language and how the story is rendered). It is story of accepting the love one thinks themselves to be worthy of. There is self sabotage and poverty, and again I was surprisingly touched.

In the final story the narrator looks back on his long relationship that has stranded. He flees to a location he was happy in, now being feted by a sugar daddy, but he finds himself changed and still processing what he had lost.

An interesting, funny but touching book, and I definitely would like to read more from the author.

Dutch quotes:
– Jaehie, wat zie je in die vent?
– Gewoon. Hij is lief voor me.
– Hij mag blijven omdat hij een grote lul heeft, waar of niet?
Jaehie keek naar me als Mozes naar de brandende braamstruik en vroeg hoe ik dat in godsnaam wist. Ik antwoordde op de meest pruilerige toon die ik in me had:
– Dat is een geschenk Gods.

Als Jaehie iets beter had kunnen liegen, waren al onze levens een stuk makkelijker geweest.

Maar dit keer was het anders.
Verraad.
Een gevoel dat ik zelden had ervaren, omdat ik nu eenmaal weinig van mensen verwachtte.

– Zeik niet zo, doe nou gewoon. Je staat toch altijd zo graag in het middelpunt!
Dat was een grove misvatting – er was een wereld van verschil tussen mijn bezopen ik en mijn ik bij daglicht.

Myeong-hee vond je boek fantastisch. Ze heeft alles gekocht wat je tot nu toe hebt uitgebracht. En je weet dat ze de slimste van al mijn vrienden is. Heeft aan Sookdae gestudeerd, zelfs. Ze zei dat ze aan je werk kan zien dat je je hebt ontwikkeld tot een waardig man.
Alles wat ik in de afgelopen drie jaar had gepubliceerd ging over comazuipen, andermans spullen stelen, illegale homo-erotiek in het leger, prostitutie, overspel – hoe zag ze daar in godsnaam ‘een waardig man’ in? Nog iets waardiger en hij zou een moord plegen. Maar goed, je moest het ze nageven, die kerkdames: het waren de beste spindoctors.

Haar extraverte persoonlijkheid was een dekmantel voor alles waarvoor ze zich schaamde, en voor haar ziekte schaamde ze zich het meest.

Maar waar was deze man op uit? Was hij open en bloot met me aan het flirten? Probeerde hij me (op een belachelijke manier) te versieren? Vast niet. Ik had thuis ook een spiegel en wist donders goed dat ik geen Venti bij de Starbucks waard was.

Ik keek naar zijn perzikvormige hoofd en zijn gezicht dat eruitzag als een koud geworden dumpling en ik smolt.

Ik mag dan zo koppig als een ezel lijken, maar stiekem ben ik een mak schaap, zoals iedere Koreaan die braaf het onderwijscurriculum van de overheid heeft nageleefd.

Het had geen zin om dat te ontkennen. Ik was in staat Gyu-ho bij me te houden omdat ik nergens in geloofde. Zo beschermde ik mezelf. Het was oké. Je kunt niet alles hebben.

Het had die nacht vast geregend. Was de vuurwerkshow daarom afgelast?
Ook aan het einde van het moessonseizoen viel soms nog regen. En tranen kwamen soms veel te laat.

Translated from Korean to English, Love in the Big City follows Young, a millennial, as he navigates life’s ups and downs.

Comprised of four sections, each one narrates a different period in Young’s life. The first section focuses on the boozy fun that Young and his best friend Jaehee get up to while at university. The duo party, go to class, meetup with men they matched with on dating sites. That is until Jaehee announces she is getting married. Now, Young must adjust to life without his best friend constantly by his side.

In the other sections, Young comes to terms with his sexuality, a medical diagnosis, his mother, and past trauma.

Love in the Big City is a coming-of-age, character-driven story.

The sections that focused on Young’s life in his early thirties were the most interesting to me. Some parts were laugh-out-loud funny, while others were somewhat depressing.

The author and translator perfectly capture what it’s like for millennials in their twenties and thirties, from hard-partying ways to job uncertainty to trying to settle down.

If any more of Sang Young Park’s books get translated into English, I will definitely give them a read.

Thank you to Grove Press for the arc via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

https://booksandwheels.com

Nominated for the International Booker Prize 2022
This Asian bestseller is a rather unusual pick for the International Booker, as the cutesy cover is not entirely misleading - but on the other hand, the autofictional story is a testament to gay life in contemporary South Korea, full of social criticism and told in a nonlinear, quite intricate style. Our narrator - called Park / Young (please note the author's name!) - is a HIV-positive gay young man with a degree in French (the author also holds a degree in French) who grows into himself as a writer in the city of Seoul. Regarding the setting, the author has stated: „I was born in a city called Daegu—one of the most conservative places in Korea. When I was a teenager, I dreamed of Seoul as a kind of platonic ideal; I arrived here in my twenties for college, and that’s when my life began for real.“

And that spirit shows: In the novel, Seoul is a multi-faceted character of its own. After his ailing mother, an Evangelical Christian, had send the narrator to conversion therapy, he flees and lives his truth in the gay bars of the big city, where he finds adventure, love, and heartbreak. The story is told non-chronologically and divided into four sections. Important events include the protagonist's time at college and his friendship with the free-spirited Jaehee; his mother's severe illness; his relationship with an older man; and a love story with a bartender.

While the structure, in the modernist tradition, mirrors the speed and disorientation of the city as well as the unstable quality of memory, the narrative voice is dry and often funny, but with a melancholic undertone. The translator proclaimed that the dialogue has an Anglo-Saxon feel, and I agree - plus there is a romcom aspect to the novel, but with a darker twist.

Not sure whether this is a good pick for the International Booker, but I'm not mad I read it.

You can listen to my interview with Frank Wynne, jury president of the International Booker 2022, here.

12 Challenge

Recommended by Avni

Short, though not novella length, this book packs quite the punch. Young's tale is told in four parts, each exemplifying the joys and difficulties of being a young man in South Korea. While I enjoyed all of the parts, the first part spoke out to me the most, as it included his friendship with his best girl friend, Jaehee. This isn't the side of Seoul you see in K-drama. This is the grittier, darker, realer side.

🖥️ Libby

❀ blog ❀ thestorygraph ❀ letterboxd ❀ tumblr ❀ ko-fi ❀

3 ¼ stars

Brimming with humor and life, Love in the Big City makes for an ​​entertaining read. I found its protagonist’s lighthearted narration to be deeply compulsive and I was hooked to his story from the very first pages. Similarly to Frying Plantain and The Nakano Thrift Shop Love in the Big City is divided into self-contained parts/chapters, each one focusing on a specific period of our main character’s life. In most of these Young, our mc, is a writer in his early thirties living in Seoul. The gritty realism of his daily life, as well as his love & sex life, brought to mind authors such as Bryan Washington. While this book does touch upon things like homophobia, abortion, STDs, suicidal ideation, it does so in a very casual way that never struck me as offensive or careless. Young is easily the star of the show as he makes for an incredibly funny and relatable character. From his failed relationships to his day-to-day mishaps. Young makes for a carefree and admirably resilient character whose inner monologue and running commentary never failed to entertain me. Love in the Big City also provides readers with a glimpse into the realities of being queer in contemporary Korean society. Yet, while the stigma, shame, and or lack of visibility Young experiences (or is made to experience) are sobering, his voice remains upbeat and easy to follow. Additionally, the author’s vibrant depiction of Seoul makes for a vivid setting. My favourite section was probably the first one, which focuses on Young’s friendship with Jaehee, who for a time is his roommate. Things get complicated when Jaehee begins to lie about Young’s gender to the boy she’s currently seeing. The sections that centre more on Young’s partners, well, they did seem a bit repetitive. Perhaps because most of the men he dates or frequents share a similar kind of dull and off-putting personality. Still, I appreciated how unsentimental the author when portraying and or discussing love and sex.
Although I have read a few books by Korean authors that are set in Korea this is the first time I’ve come across one that is so wonderfully unapologetically queer and sex-positive. More of this, please!
Love in the Big City makes for a candid, insightful, and above all witty read exploring the life of a young(ish) gay man in Seoul.

2.5 this kinda sucked lmao

You know that feeling when a book absolutely blows your mind beyond what you were expecting? That was Love in the Big City for me. I would recommend this book over and over again.

This novel chronicles a South Korean gay man’s life from his early 20s to early 30s. This book was so funny, tender, heartbreaking and rendered its protagonist with so much complexity and nuance.

Sang Young Park captures a melancholy that is so particular to queer lives. He never lets the reader steep in it, however, but rather celebrates the specificity of this feeling in all the messy and triumphant moments that make up the narrator’s life. You know when you laugh, but can also recognize that behind that humor is a deep and true sadness? So many passages in this novel felt like that. It also touches on queer millennial loneliness, which really resonated with me and hit the right notes.

The story is a brilliant depiction of queer life in South Korea including complex family dynamics, friendships, our deeply human need for love and all the emotional turmoil that comes from the necessity of it in our lives. This really gave me a wider perspective on queer culture in other countries and how it is shaped similarly and differently than my own experiences. The novel is broken up into four distinct sections and the author seamlessly weaves the reader between different points in time. The prose was absolutely knockout, just amazing and gorgeous sentences that I devoured with every turn of the page - this was nice as I was expecting contemporary and I got something much more within the realm of literary fiction and auto fiction.

This novel is truly a landmark in modern queer lit, I’m so happy I stumbled upon it and grateful it was translated into English (magnificently I might add). It’s inclusion on the Booker International long list is much deserved.

more than halfway through the year and i finally read a book worth 4 stars i love you gay ppl ❤️

rtc

What I love about Love in the Big City is just how much personality it has. The narrative voice comes through so strongly in this novel, and you can tell that almost immediately. This is not a story where you can really separate plot from character, because every element of Love in the Big City is suffused with the personality of its narrator. And that's really the beginning and end of it when it comes to this book: whether you enjoy Love in the Big City or not is going to hinge on how well you get along with that narrator and their voice. Young is deeply flawed, as all good characters are, and the novel offers a space for him to grapple with those flaws and the ways they are sometimes amplified and sometimes highlighted by the circumstances of his life and the relationships he forms, and dissolves. And those relationships are so important because they form the scaffolding of Love in the Big City: each of this novel's chapters focuses on a relationship, whether platonic or romantic, fleeting or lasting. I found it a really compelling way to structure a story, especially because it brings to light the many ways in which we understand our relationship to ourselves through our relationship with others.

Make no mistake, though: this is not a self-serious novel. Part of what makes it so enjoyable is that it doesn't always take itself seriously. Young is an often sarcastic and snarky narrator, not afraid to trivialize or make fun of the things he should, presumably, approach with gravity. This is what makes him such a fun character, but also such a flawed one. His flippancy is what allows him to survive his circumstances, but also what holds him back from confronting them and, by extension, growing.

I really enjoyed this novel, if you couldn't tell, and I can't wait to see more of Sang Young Park's work get translated into English.

Thanks so much to Grove Press for providing me with an e-ARC of this in exchange for an honest review!

48th book of 2022.

At the weekend I met up with my old uni housemate near Covent Garden. We got lunch and then started wandering. By the late afternoon we'd made it to the long and wide streets of Bloomsbury and fell into a small coffee-shop where they served our coffees with coconut macaroons. Then we went to the bookshop nearby where my friend gets 50% as he works for the chain. I searched for Love in the Big City. We both complimented how great the cover is and then began heading back to Victoria.

Tilted Axis Press are showing up a lot now after they had three of their novels appear on the Man Booker International longlist (this, Tomb of Sand and Happy Stories, Mostly). They predominantly work with Asian writers, sometimes translating them into English for the first time. Tomb of Sand is the first Hindi-language novel to ever make it onto the International longlist. So it's great stuff.

Love in the Big City is comprised of four parts following Mr Young/Mr Park/a variation on the writer, Sang Young Park. He says himself in the Acknowledgements, '"Young," who narrates the four stories in this book, is simultaneously the same person and different people.' In a way it feels more like four short stories but the distinction between a novel and collection seems to always be growing wider and wider. Sometimes I wonder if there needs to be a distinction at all, but that's another matter. The narrator (always the same but different) navigates life as a gay man in Korea in the 21st century, ranging between his 20s to his 30s throughout the parts. The novel explores the dating world, sexually transmitted diseases, cancer, friendship, love, and most importantly the embarrassment and shame of homosexuality in modern-day Korea. The latter theme is perhaps the most striking of the novel. In some ways it felt like a sort of Korean Sally Rooney, with the Tinder dates, the characters all searching for something (though half the time they don't know what). Park writes well and though there were a few corny lines here and there that threw me out of it, a bit too maudlin and on-the-nose, on the whole I was impressed. I read the first 90 pages in one go on a train ride home from London. It's breezy gentle prose to get lost in whilst reading about familiar existential crises.

'I moved into a studio apartment with the excuse of concentrating on my job search (I couldn't stand living with my mother anymore). I took part-time jobs because I needed to pay rent and feed myself. And once I got a taste of what it meant to be in the real world, I immediately lost all appetite for building or achieving anything. It's pointless—just the same thing in a different place, I thought. Frustration and rage, hope saddled with despair, the days dripping over you like sweat. It's the same thing with love. I'm too far gone to expect anything new. Looking for jobs, writing, men—all the same boredom.'

This fictional tweaking of the author's autobiographical journey as a young gay man in Seoul - incorporating narrative threads from the lives of those around him as well - was a moderate disappointment. I found the protagonist, Young, less charming as things progressed and struggled to empathize with his cycle of self-defeating behaviors.

I went through many men after I broke up with him. Love that disappeared like light rain over asphalt, hot love, urgent love that faded after a single night...

I can't believe I have to say this but just because someone you found on Tindr (or in a bar) will get drunk with you and have sex because one or both of you are horny does not mean you have found love. This is the case everywhere but particularly in The Big City. Even Jane Austen would agree that this is a truth universally acknowledged. The Young at the end of the book was years older but not a whole lot wiser for having been through a lot of disappointment and loss. That lack of growth limits the impact this book might otherwise have, I think.

The Afterward is revealing; more of an Apologia, really. I'm very pleased to know that this collection of interrelated short stories has "spoken" in unique ways to certain people who have not previously found such representation in literature. For my part, however, I did find similar subject matter treated more skillfully in recent works by Ocean Vuong, Anthony Veasno So, and Alexander Chee.

2.5 stars

I picked this book up due to its recent longlisting for the International Booker prize.

The NPR review says Park's novel can be read as an anthropological approach to Seoulite queer lives in the 21st century and it certainly succeeds in that endeavour.

However, on a sentence, by sentence level, I thought this was fairly ho-hum. It's advertised as a debut novel but I would argue it is linked short stories rather than a fully realised novel. As always with translations, it is hard to tease out if something was lost in the translation or if I genuinely just didn't connect with the author's style.

Just not a book for me in the end but I wish the author well in his future endeavours

One of the most heartfelt and realistic love stories I've read in a long time, as a lover of a good romance novel, this is one that is truly sensitively written about what it means to date as a gay man in their 30s today.

The story centers on Young, a novice writer who spends his nights on Tinder, hooking up, battling loneliness, and hanging out with his best friend Jaehee, a charismatic and fun loving woman. As many friendships evolve and change, Jaehee marries and settles down.

Young's friendship with her cools off, but of course, they still have a bond that endures. But Park writes this storyline with such a fresh and bittersweet insight that all I could do was reminisce about my own personal friendships with old girlfriends, past or present that have either ended, cooled down, or endured.

Park writes wonderfully what life is like with such charm that reading more of this book, I found it irresistible reading more about the adventures and sexcapades that Young finds himself in.

Young also dates two different kinds of men- at 25, dates a charming older man (37) who wants to keep his sexuality and of course, their relationship, a secret. He is also pretentious, self serving and passive aggressive. He takes out his frustrations and projects them to Young, in which I can also say I relate well to, having had my share of dating various older men (5 years or more than myself).

There is one particular moment I was personally triggered by when Young tries to do something silly and sweet for him and the older man he's dating, yet the older man's reaction to this is condescending and rude.

He ridicules Young and basically calls him stupid and naive because of his age and inexperience with life, "my heart seemed to shrink into itself with worry...there was only one question into my mind then. Who was he, and what was I to him? The longer I spent with him, the more I realized just how incompatible we were" (Park 112).

After this traumatic and learning experience, Young finds himself shaped by the abuse that the older man inflicted on him and drowns himself with more casual encounters till he meets the practical and sweet natured Gyu-ho.

For a while, it seems like the two have found themselves in a relationship out of stability and love, where for once, Young feels secure, "mostly we slept on our own beds but occasionally the same one, not having sex, but taking turns giving each other an arm pillow, breathing in the scent of each other's chests or armpits, slowly coming to believe that this was what it meant to love and be together" (Park 180). What a HELL of a statement!

Of course, Gyu-ho and Young eventually separate, and as Young becomes a more confident writer, it is this love that endures, and he spends every day looking for something like it.

I couldn't have found a love story more poignant and realistic as this- and found myself hugging the novel as I finished its last sentence. Mature, wise and messy, it's a love story of the times that deserves to be read for everybody.

Longlisted for the 2022 International Booker Prize

Me at ten years old terrified over bleeding to death from holes all over my body, me at nineteen writing about my mother to earn some extra cash, and me at thirty whipping myself up into a frenzy of vengeful hate to write stories about people who’d been kind to me, for strangers who didn’t know me—all of these versions of me were sitting behind my mother that day.

Love in the Big City is Anton Hur’s translation of 박상영’s (Sang Young Park’s) 대도시 사랑법 published in Korea in 2019.

It is due for publication in Autumn 2021, in the UK by Tilted Axis Press and in the US by Grove Press, and thanks to the latter for the ARC via Netgalley.

Love in the Big City is narrated by Park Young, a young gay man, born in 1988 the centre of the millenial generation, trying to start out as a writer while working dead-end jobs, listening to both Western and K-pop, searching for love among the nightlife of Seoul, and wrestling with his mother's rejection of his sexuality.

It is written as an ‘omnibus novel’, actually a collection of four distinct stories from different episodes in Young’s life. Indeed each is designed to stand independently, although as a whole give us a coherent picture of his life. The author’s own description from when he was finalising the book:

As to what it’s about . . . if I may be a bit pretentious here again, the key words would basically be queers and Catholicism, women, abortion, STDs, and economic class. I guess it’s about the emptiness that anyone living in a big city these days feels in their everyday lives, written in a very detailed and funny string of love stories. I’m calling it How to Love in the Big City for now, after one of the chapters. I may change the title to Late Rainy Season Vacation.

PART ONE Jaehee (재희) tells of how he ended up moving in with a fellow college student, Jaehee, both of them being, relatively speaking, regarded as outsiders from the sexual morals of their peers, Jaehee for her drinking and sexual promiscuity, and Young for his homosexuality.

언젠가 내가 냉동 블루베리를 맛있게 먹는 걸 본 이후로 재희는 마트에서 장을 볼 때마다 벌크 사이즈의 미국산 냉동 블루베리를 사다 냉동실에 넣어놓곤 했다. 나는 보답처럼 재희가 좋아하는 말보로 레드를 사서 냉동실 블루베리의 옆자리에 올려놓았다. 재희는 새 담배를 꺼내 피울 때마다 입술이 시원해서 좋다고 했다.

After seeing me snacking on frozen blueberries, she always stocked the freezer with bulk-size bags of frozen American blueberries. In return, I bought her favorite cigarettes, Marlboro Reds, and stacked them next to the blueberries in the freezer. Jaehee said she loved how cool her lips felt whenever she smoked the first cigarette from a new pack.

PART TWO A Bite of Rockfish, Taste the Universe (우럭 한점 우주의 맛) is set some years later later, and has the now c.30 year-old Young looking back on his relationship with a man twelve years (a whole Chinese zodiac cycle) older. Young gradually realises that his lover is ashamed of his own sexuality.

But this story centres around Young’s relationship with his deeply religious mother, who, when she first saw him, aged 16, kissing another boy, had him committed to a psychiatric institution (who decided the issue was her obsessive control, not Young’s sexuality), but who is now in the late stage of cancer.

PART THREE Love in the Big City (대도시의 사랑법) tells of perhaps Young’s one true love, Gyu-ho, Jeju born, Seoul his ‘big city’ after his island upbringing.

Young reflects on his history with Gyu-ho, who is both far more open and more practical ([I couldn’t]understand why anyone would set their heart on a drill set).

Young also tells how he discovered, while on military service, that he had caught (I think) AIDS from his then lover, although he calls it by a different name:

The first thing I did to process my new reality was what I did best. Creatively name things. I named it Kylie, but not because my life had gone down the gutter while I’d been listening to Kylie Minogue. I just liked the name. If I was going to live with this thing for the rest of my life, I thought I might as well give it a pretty name, so Kylie it was.

Yeah. More than Madonna, Ariana, Britney, or Beyoncé, it’s got to be Kylie. No question.

Other big cities feature in the story - a vacation to Bangkok and a potential for both to transfer to Shanghai, which, combined with Kylie, ultimately leads to their separation, as Young would have to take a medical test for the role.

PART FOUR Late Rainy Season Vacation (늦은 우기의 바캉스) is set in Bangkok, one year after the vacation Young and Gyu-ho took together. Young, now 32, has returned there with an older man he met on Tinder in Seoul for a one-night stand:

Thirty-nine on Tinder, but much older in reality. He wore formal attire, even a necktie pin and cufflinks, a Rolex watch, and had various currencies in a Louis Vuitton wallet. The only other thing I knew about him was the fact that at the end of October, late into vacation season when I had nothing special to do, he had called. But it wasn’t as if I had realized that much about myself, either. Just a few months ago, I never would’ve thought that I would, at thirty-two, be going on a late-rainy-season vacation at the end of October.

He ends up, coincidentally, in the same hotel he stayed with Gyu-ho and looks back wistfully on their time in Bangkok and their cutesy relationship generally (they call each other Usami and Kamakachi after the cartoon characters and wear matching Pororo accessories), albeit the reader notes the contrast to their actual relationship in Part 3, where they had appeared to be getting bored of each other and frustrated at their domestic incompatibility (Young is completely impractical, but fastidious about the proper way to dry clothes)

I think that for a while now, using the medium of writing, I’ve tried to prove over and over again in many other stories I’ve written that the relationship between Gyu-ho and me was something so special to us that no one could take it away from us, that it was 100 percent real. Using all kinds of other methods to create Gyu-ho and write him as other characters, I’ve tried to show the relationship we had and the time we spent together as complete as they were, but the more I try, the further I get from him and the emotions I had back then.

Overall, the insight into the queer culture of Korea, in a still conversative society is fascinating, and indeed the wider culture (the importance of relative seniority and the use of formal or informal language - an insightful friend tells Young when two people are different ages but speak informal Korean to each other, they’ve had sex). One of the more significant Covid outbreaks in Korea had its roots in the very Itaewon club’s Young frequents, the issue being that contact tracing proved difficult due to those frequenting the area wanting anonymity (https://time.com/5836699/south-korea-...). Although the largest outbreaks were associated with mega-churches, particularly a more cult-like organisation that initially refused to provide contact details to the authorities.

And the four stories do create a very convincing portrait of Young and his evolution.

But against that, I don’t tend to find relatively plainly written accounts of millennial culture terribly interesting in purely literary terms. To give a Western heterosexual equivalent, Sally Rooney’s work passes me by completely.

3 stars (although closer to 4 than 2)

Interviews with the author and translator:

https://koreanliteraturenow.com/inter...

https://www.wordswithoutborders.org/d...

Serialisation of the title story of the author’s earlier collection The Tears of an Unknown Artist, or Zaytun Pasta (알려지지 않은 예술가의 눈물과 자이툰 파스타) and which gets a nod in this book:

https://www.wordswithoutborders.org/a...

https://www.wordswithoutborders.org/a...

https://www.wordswithoutborders.org/a...

Love in the Big City is really four separate vignettes/stories woven together rather than a straightforward novel. If you are looking for a plot-driven novel with a clear-cut beginning and end, this one may not be for you. This is more an exploration of the effects relationships can have on us, whether enduring or simply in the moment, as well as one’s journey to combat loneliness in the modern world.

Each of the four segments is defined by a relationship with another character, whether it be romantic, platonic, or familial. While the writing was oftentimes cute, humorous, or snarky, many of the moments within were actually quite sad. The narrative voice in the novel comes across as quite strong and I appreciated the author’s shielding the reader of its more melancholy moments through the protagonist’s flippant and casual narration. Notwithstanding, the novel can be quite evocative in the way it’s written.

This was a really refreshing read for me as it was quite unlike anything else I read this year. That being said, some aspects of the novel frustrated me- namely how stereotypical and monolithic I felt queer men were portrayed. I was, however, able to look past that as I feel the author was perfectly aware of this while writing and in some instances the story necessitated it. Many parts of the novel resonated with me as I am sure they will with other readers of my generation, as well as queer men in general. I also have to really hand it to Sang Young Park for writing an HIV+ character in a sensitive, thoughtful, and nuanced fashion. I felt the treatment surrounding this issue in the gay community was particularly realistic and well-done.

This isn’t one that I loved right from the beginning, but I certainly appreciated it the further I read. It won’t be for everyone, but if it sparks your interest- you likely won’t be disappointed.

*I received a free ARC of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Set in Seoul, South Korea, Love in the Big City is a warm, playful, emotionally rich novel that weaves together four interconnected vignettes to tell the story of its narrator, Park Young, as he matures over the course of his 20s and 30s. Split into four sections—each of which could conceivably stand alone as a short story—Love in the Big City first introduces the friendship between Park Young and Jaehee, a fellow student who, like Young, spends most of her free time drinking and hooking up with random men. The two move in together, sharing everything, and the platonic love between them is palpable; Young keeps Jaehee’s favorite Marlboro cigarettes stocked and Jaehee buys him his favorite frozen blueberries. When Jaehee uncharacteristically decides to settle down and get married after years of the two sharing their young and free lifestyle, Young feels betrayed and unmoored, which leads to a series of inauspicious romantic trysts.

You can read my full review HERE on BookBrowse and a piece I wrote about contemporary Korean literature in translation HERE.

Longlisted for the International Booker Prize 2022

I have another backlog of books to review, so I'll keep this one short. This book thoroughly deserves its place on the Booker International knowledge - an account of the life of a young gay man in South Korea that is at least partly autofictional. The main protagonist Young is not always likeable, but in many ways this makes the book more honest, and it succeeds very well in conveying his lifestyle and the challenges it involves, and is very enjoyable to read.

3.5 stars. A novel in stories about a young gay man in South Korea that linger in romance and melancholy.

The book is broken up into four sections, they're not in chronological order, and sometimes they bleed into each other. We start with Young's friendship with Jaehee, they're both misfits of a sort and she's the only one who doesn't seem to care about his sexuality. It is both a supportive and a little bit destructive, as relationships in your early 20's can be. The three other sections are mostly about Young's lovers and boyfriends, though there's also a lot caring for his mother, who's dying of cancer.

Young knows who he is and is frank about it, though he does suffer from some internalized homophobia. When he's younger he worries about being read as gay, though as he gets older he tends to be the more open one in his relationships. This isn't really a book about finding lasting love, but we do get to see the different ways Young views his relationships, from incredibly romanticized to more detached.

As I usually do for queer readers, I want to note that this is mild in terms of "queer suffering." This is set in a place where there is still a lot of hostility towards gay people, and while Young doesn't run into any physical violence or even any real harassment, there is a lot of fear that he and others have in how they get through their daily lives. It isn't very severe in terms of what happens, but it is a thread that is almost always there.

One thing I particularly liked, though, is the frankness about STI's, which are an important plot point in one section. After Young tests positive for an STI (it's viral and treatment is lifelong which suggests something like HIV) he names it "Kylie" and is often thinking about it in terms of how it will impact his life and his relationships. He is also not at all melodramatic about it, just practical, which is what happens to most people and yet it's rarely depicted in fiction.

A good look at queer life in modern Korea, but the writing failed to keep me interested throughout. More a collection of linked short stories than a novel.

Wow. Je ne m’attendais pas à être si touché par ce livre. J’ai vraiment beaucoup (beaucoup) aimé.

On y suit Young, jeune gay sud-coréen, dans une autofiction presqu’autobiograohique, à la manière de ce que pouvait faire Hervé Guibert en son temps.
Si j’ai eu peur au début de suivre un journal de débauche sous couvert d’humour, j’ai rapidement atterri dans un récit touchant, qui m’a bouleversé à certains moments.

Le livre d’axe autour de 4 parties, qui traitent de sujet très différents, même si elles restent très liées entres elles. À aucun moment je n’ai senti la moindre longueur. J’ai tout lu en apnée, le cœur battant au rythme des mots de l’auteur.

Merci à La Croisée pour cette traduction (et pour toutes ces parutions queer de leur catalogue), j’ai déjà hâte de lire les autres écrits de l’auteur.

made me believe in books again

Charyzmatyczna, świadoma i zapadają w pamięć. Chętnie do niej wrócę w polskim przekładzie.

This didn’t do it for me. Loved the themes and story, disliked the execution. Bland/clunky/blah writing.

I did like Part 2 for the most part. And there were occasional moments of beauty in the other three sections (especially in the tail end of the fourth), but overall, it was an underwhelming reading experience. Oh well, it happens.

Calling all gay millennials - read this book.

Especially if you're living in/have lived in a country where homosexuality isn't exactly approved of.

Now, some people talk about this book as if it's four short stories, but I view them as very clearly linked, with a very clear protagonist throughout. Maybe that's just me, but there seems to be a clear journey from college to mid-thirties of Young, a Korean man coming to terms with himself and his identity, and relationships with his mother, a female best friend, a closeted man, and a very sweet bartender.

Having lived in South Korea myself, I thoroughly enjoyed all the references, and the depiction of life as a gay man in Korea - partners terrified of anything that could remotely be perceived as PDA, self-hating men, outright homophobia - but also as a gay millennial in general: dating apps, being in that weird liminal stage where the offline world transitioned into the largely online world, the dawn of PreP.

The narrative voice really sold it to me here. Young isn't perfect; he's thoroughly and unashamedly human. There's a lot about loss, love and self-acceptance, and our relationships with others, and how we move on from those (or not).

A great read!

8th book from my reading challenge with Ted.

# 10 - Read a book by an Asian writer (excluding Japanese).

Tricky one to review. In theory, so many of the themes that I dig in the contemporary novels I enjoy were present - Young, the narrator, was adept at making the reader feel the loneliness, apathy, and yearning that seem to be common topics in most post-2010 literary fiction. Unfortunately, the most beautiful and exciting few pages of writing in this book came at the very end, which was about 230 pages too late. I want to believe that something was lost in translation, but I am not sure. I really can’t seem to narrow it down. The eventual distance that comes between Young and his best friend Jaehee should be tinged with sadness. I should feel the same emptiness that Young experiences as he searches for love, where he is unlucky in a relationship with some literary asshole who is afraid to show his love to him openly. I really should feel Young’s desperation at creating a few moments of magic between him and his mother, trying to have one or two drops of memory to hang on to in the future. I should feel all these things, and yet I don’t.