Love in the Big City
Sang Young Park (translated by Anton Hur)
Tilted Axis Press: 2021
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Explosive. Dramatic. Campy. When asked about his favourite aspects of translating Sang Young Park’s Love in the Big City, this is how Anton Hur describes the joy and difficulty of rendering the novel’s Korean curse words into English. These are also terms one might use to describe the book as a whole, whose prose has elsewhere been compared to the ‘vibrant, addictive’ quality of an iphone screen. Love in the Big City is narrated from the perspective of a gay man named Young, who recalls the many different people he has loved and lost coming of age in Seoul during the 2010s. Indeed, the novel presents a vision of love as loss, as each of its four parts begins in medias res, after the narrator has already lost, or is on the verge of losing, a close friend, lover or family member. It then flashes back to an earlier point in the narrator’s life, from which he explains how he came to love, then lose, this particular person.

Part one of the novel, ‘Jaehee’, begins with the narrator in attendance at his best friend’s wedding. He is grumpy and alienated from the other wedding guests, cohorts from the university who ask him annoying questions about his personal life he’d rather not answer. It soon becomes clear that Jaehee’s wedding, a ritual of heterosexual love that also affirms Jaehee’s entrance into mainstream Korean society, means something quite different for Young, a gay man for whom Jaehee’s marriage signals the loss of their friendship and the end of their youth together. He then begins to narrate the story of how he and Jaehee met, and all of the events that transpired between them up until the point of her marriage.

• Tags: Issue 26, Korea, Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda, Sang Young Park