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pasawayjulz's review
reflective
sad
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.75
adnanwijayarso's review against another edition
lighthearted
sad
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
2.5
khanyisile13's review against another edition
emotional
reflective
sad
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.5
This so candidly told story felt like I was sitting with a friend who was telling me bedtime stories. It’s so honest and frank, but so vulnerable that it’s easy to connect to simply because the main character is wearing their heart openly on their sleeve. It was written like a mémoire, a real take of how this person operated through life - and how he operated was by seeking love in other people. His stories had no shame, only real emotion, and that’s what also made the humorous parts of it so charming. I will say the pace became inconsistent, slowing down to suit the changes in the story, which is perfectly fine but you can feel it as a reader. There was also a good bunch of contemporary poetic lines that if you read the book too quickly, you might miss them, but if you savour each word, they’ll sit with you. I’m obsessed with Jae-Hee as a character, although she’s brash, she’s fiercely loyal and so endearing in that sense. I wanted to be her friend after reading about her. His complex connection to his mother was both entertaining and heartbreaking to read, I saw her in so many mothers of colour who are intensely stubborn, yet there’s no denying that they’re trying their best. The humanity of this book is what leaps out to you most, the loneliness in it becomes its own character, lurking in the sidelines and informing essential decisions. Seoul was also a main character, the location’s subtle descriptions and the way each character is connected to the city and South Korea as a whole is significant to the movement of the story. I found the night time descriptions transporting. There’s no real plot, but there’s heart, and you can’t deny it.
strawberrywafer's review against another edition
funny
lighthearted
reflective
sad
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.75
chizza's review against another edition
emotional
lighthearted
sad
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
spenkevich's review against another edition
4.0
‘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 [a:Anton Hur|6072784|Anton Hur|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1690821807p2/6072784.jpg] (they also translated Cursed Bunny by [a:Bora Chung|21076668|Bora Chung|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1649812584p2/21076668.jpg]), 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.
It is a complex identity, and he grapples with what it means to be a queer Korean man while being the ‘by-product of American imperialism and Western capitalism that I was,’ and how anyone can love and live in a world dominated by money and success. Frequently in the novel we find characters that are struggling with denial of their own conditions, such as the older, self-hating boyfriend who views homosexuality as an ‘evil colonial practice of the American Empire,’ or the mother that won’t accept the severity of her cancer diagnosis.
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.
When a lover lingers long enough in her life to notice something is amiss and Young is found out, even the fact that he is a gay man isn’t enough to quell the notion that a woman living unmarried with a man is shameful. The boyfriend allows it to continue but frequently plays the martyr stating that ‘other men’ wouldn’t allow it. In contrast to Young and his group of club-going friends, dubbed the T-aras after the South Korean all woman musical group, we see his older boyfriend being unable to allow public affection in fear of being outed. Other stigmas, such as HIV, come up in the novel such as when Young has to submit a blood test for a job and his condition becomes something that is career-prospect stifling as well as socially. While the novel shows a thriving LGBTQ+ community in Seoul, this is with the knowledge that there are no legal protections against discrimination due to gender identity or sexuality in housing in South Korea, and gay marriage has yet to be legalized.
‘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.’
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 [a:Anton Hur|6072784|Anton Hur|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1690821807p2/6072784.jpg] (they also translated Cursed Bunny by [a:Bora Chung|21076668|Bora Chung|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1649812584p2/21076668.jpg]), 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.’
It is a complex identity, and he grapples with what it means to be a queer Korean man while being the ‘by-product of American imperialism and Western capitalism that I was,’ and how anyone can love and live in a world dominated by money and success. Frequently in the novel we find characters that are struggling with denial of their own conditions, such as the older, self-hating boyfriend who views homosexuality as an ‘evil colonial practice of the American Empire,’ or the mother that won’t accept the severity of her cancer diagnosis.
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?’
When a lover lingers long enough in her life to notice something is amiss and Young is found out, even the fact that he is a gay man isn’t enough to quell the notion that a woman living unmarried with a man is shameful. The boyfriend allows it to continue but frequently plays the martyr stating that ‘other men’ wouldn’t allow it. In contrast to Young and his group of club-going friends, dubbed the T-aras after the South Korean all woman musical group, we see his older boyfriend being unable to allow public affection in fear of being outed. Other stigmas, such as HIV, come up in the novel such as when Young has to submit a blood test for a job and his condition becomes something that is career-prospect stifling as well as socially. While the novel shows a thriving LGBTQ+ community in Seoul, this is with the knowledge that there are no legal protections against discrimination due to gender identity or sexuality in housing in South Korea, and gay marriage has yet to be legalized.
‘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.’
ruyi_t's review against another edition
4.0
The book was funny, smartly written and translated and overall very entertaining. It really explores navigating adulthood, lost love and dealing with a broken heart. It was a very modern love story involving alot of Tinder, drinking and sugar daddies.
But this book was marketed as a book about friendship between Young and Jaehee, bonding over soju and Marlborough Reds, but tell me why, they completely ignore Jaehee after she gets married. instead, we get a whole story about Young and his situationships, failed relationships and hook-ups. It is a good read, but just not what I expected
But this book was marketed as a book about friendship between Young and Jaehee, bonding over soju and Marlborough Reds, but tell me why, they completely ignore Jaehee after she gets married. instead, we get a whole story about Young and his situationships, failed relationships and hook-ups. It is a good read, but just not what I expected
youpie's review against another edition
emotional
funny
reflective
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.5