20 Sep / Love in the Big City by Sang Young Park, translated by Anton Hur [in Booklist]
In the “big city” of Seoul, love isn’t easy to find – even tougher to secure is love that lasts. Young and Jaehee are best friends from university, bonded in their “boundless energy of [being] poor, promiscuous twenty-year-olds.” Young is a gay man, Jaehee a straight woman; as adults, they share a studio apartment, their lives driven by meeting men, drinking to oblivion, to be repeated at every opportunity.
And then Jaehee marries and moves out. Young’s relationships have evolved (a bit), but permanence eludes. Meanwhile, even as his mother succumbs to cancer, she’s still asking him about (traditional) marriage. In the midst of his loneliness – perhaps because he’s so much alone – Young becomes an award-winning new writer.
Despite the usual protestations that “all characters and incidents are fiction,” Sang Young Park’s ending acknowledgments seem to reveal notable autobiographical overlaps as a young, gay Korean writer. Self-described queer Korean translator Anton Hur empathically delivers Park’s affecting English-language debut to Western audiences. A bestseller in Korea for being a significant (and rare!) gay novel, Park’s lost-love(s) narrative is also a universal literary beacon for readers of all backgrounds.
Review: “Fiction,” Booklist, September 15, 2021
Readers: Adult
Published: 2019 (Korea), 2021 (United States)