In Love in the Big City by Sang Young Park, the narrator manages to silence both himself and the reader after an animated and lusty beginning.
Location: various neighborhoods in Seoul, South Korea and Bangkok, Thailand.
Love in the Big City synopsis
A funny, transporting, surprising, and poignant novel that was one of the highest-selling debuts of recent years in Korea, Love in the Big City tells the story of a young gay man searching for happiness in the lonely city of Seoul.
Love in the Big City is an energetic, joyful, and moving novel that depicts both the glittering nighttime world of Seoul and the bleary-eyed morning-after. Young is a cynical yet fun-loving Korean student who pinballs from home to class to the beds of recent Tinder matches. He and Jaehee, his female best friend and roommate, frequent nearby bars where they push away their anxieties about their love lives, families, and money with rounds of soju and ice-cold Marlboro Reds that they keep in their freezer. Yet over time, even Jaehee leaves Young to settle down, leaving him alone to care for his ailing mother and to find companionship in his relationships with a series of men, including one whose handsomeness is matched by his coldness, and another who might end up being the great love of his life.
Book review
Early on, the narrator – Young – realizes that the world is full of lonely people. He and his female friend Jaehee band together as they each have their one-night stands and relationships with men. Together they discuss and judge the men’s bodies and their performance in bed. After Jaehee settles down, he seems lost when this part of his life is over, and everyone involved loses the fun dynamic that Young and Jaehee’s friendship brought.
Flamboyant?
Young is an energetic storyteller who dares to try, dares to live. The reader is a spectator of his serious and not so serious relationships and friendships. He appears rather flamboyant and frivolous at first, especially compared to other characters, but he is very aware of what others think of him and jokes about the praise he received for his “objective self-judgment”.
He is not immune to the way many people in society treat gay people. This is evident in the way he describes his actions as going full drama-queen mode and the cliché “I knew you were gay the moment I laid eyes on you,” but also in the assumptions his fellow students make because of his mannerisms. Except for Jaehee and his dates, there are mostly negative reactions to his relationships with men. His mother denies it, people on the street call him a faggot, and even one of his boyfriends is convinced it’s a disease. He deals with it by laughing in situations where he should get angry.
With each failed relationship and friendship, he becomes more lonely. The story becomes heavier and the tone shifts. Then Gyu-ho appears and simply likes him “because you are you.” Gyu-ho charms the reader with ease, but has to go out of his way to charm the narrator, who seems restless and doesn’t know what he’s looking for in a relationship. At some point, he does figure it out…
Character transformation
I love how his spirit and energy changed over the course of the book. Compared to the second half, the first half was lighthearted reading. Sang Young Park portrays the gradual character transformation very convincingly as the narrator goes from being full of life to “missing the boat” so to speak when he can’t make it work, not knowing what “it” is.
At the beginning of the book the narrator shares his laughter and energy with you, and by the end he manages to silence both himself and you with the finale in Thailand.
Interested?
Get your copy of Love in the Big City from Amazon (available 9 November 2021).
Book details
Title: Love in the Big City
Author: Sang Young Park
Translator: Anton Hur
Language: English
Publisher: Grove Press
Pages: 240
ISBN (13): 9780802158789
Publication date: 9 November 2021
About the author and translator
Sang Young Park was born in 1988 and studied French at Sungkyunkwan University. He lives in Seoul. He worked as a magazine editor, copywriter, and consultant for seven years before debuting as a novelist. Love in the Big City is his English-language debut. A runaway bestseller, the novel hit the top five lists of all the major bookstores and went into nine printings. Both award-winning for its unique literary voice and perspective, and particularly resonant with young readers, it has been a phenomenon in Korea and is poised to capture a worldwide readership.
Anton Hur was born in Stockholm, Sweden. He won a PEN Translates award for Kang Kyeong-ae’s The Underground Village. He lives in Seoul.
Many thanks to Grove Press and NetGalley for a digital ARC of this novel in exchange for an honest review.
