Definitely a very gay book. It has every thing in a gay book formula: drinking, promiscuity, a girl best friend, a first love turned into broken heart, middle-class afflictions, etc. To be quite honest there's not much new in this book that hasn't been done before, but it's funny and surprisingly has this optimistic tone that I like despite the depressing things going on in the story.

Love in the Big City revolves around Park Young, a young gay millennial, and his search for love. The book divides into 4 independent stories focusing on different episodes and ages. The first story focuses on his college days and a non romantic relationship. Sharing an apartment with a female college friend, Jaehee, at least until her marriage, they drink and play hard, while switching a lot of bed partners.

The second story focuses on an obsessive love to an older man who was a student activist and has polar political views as well as a deeply ingrained abhorrence to their mutual sexual identity. The story also reveals a lot about the narrator's troubled relationship with his deeply religious Catholic mother, whom he has to nurse through a cancer recurrence. The third story focuses on the love of his life, a Jeju-do burn bartender who eventually moves in with him. The story also reveals that he has contracted the HIV virus while in the military. The fourth and the shortest part takes place mainly in Bangkok where he vacation with an older guy he met through tinder while reminiscing about the trip he made previously with the Jeju-do boyfriend.

There are a lot of cultural codes and cues to unpack in Love in the Big City, from the use of differential language or informal one, the meaning behind gestures like putting a flower in your hair, addresses that spell affluence, generational gaps and differences in politics. However nothing is spoon fed to the reader. I loved that the stories spoke fore themselves, describing what being gay in a conservative country entails. All in all I highly recommend.
Thank you NetGalley and Grove Press for giving me an ARC in exchange for an honest review.
#LoveintheBigCity #NetGalley

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 by 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 this 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!

I really enjoyed reading this book and getting to hear from a perspective that I haven’t encountered much before. Love in the Big City is translated from Korean and follows the life of a young gay man in Seoul. The story is told in four sections, delving deep into the protagonist's relationship with his best friend, mother, and romantic partners.

It did take me a bit to get fully into the story. In the beginning I was thrown by how it felt like I wasn’t getting to know the main character as deeply as the side characters. I also found the writing to be a little utilitarian for my taste. But in reading further into the book I discovered beautiful passages and the slow, complex development of the main character.

Some heavy topics are involved in the book, like homophobia, illness, loneliness, and strained relationships with family. However the story never fully felt like a tragedy. There are definitely moments of joy as well in partying with friends, romance, and sex. I’m definitely interested in reading more from Sang Young Park in the future.

“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 (Park Sang-Young’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-coronavirus-lgbtq-itaewon/). 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/interviews/park-sang-young-web-exclusive-interview-sang-young-park-novelist-modern-na%C3%AFve

https://www.wordswithoutborders.org/dispatches/article/an-interview-with-sang-young-park-anton-hur

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/article/february-2019-the-tears-of-an-unknown-artist-or-zaytun-pasta-sang-young-par

https://www.wordswithoutborders.org/article/march-2019-the-tears-of-an-unknown-artist-or-zaytun-pasta-part-ii-sang

https://www.wordswithoutborders.org/article/april-2019-the-tears-of-an-unknown-artist-or-zaytun-pasta-part-iii-sang

Sang Young Park's Love in the Big City is his first novel to be published in English translation. Park’s book is a serial novel (and clearly autobiographical— its protagonist, also a young gay writer living in Seoul, even sits down at his desk to work on his autobiographical novel one point) composed of four interlocking, roughly chronological tales, each of which occupy the murky space between short story and novella. True to its title, each novella focuses on a particular kind of complicated love: best-friendship; head-over-heels “obsession” with a mysterious, handsome, and closeted older man; romantic love; the revolving-door hookups particularly endemic to gay relationships.

And Park does not shy away from the complex and often abject nature of such relationships: their taboo status in Korean society, how even a promising match can descend into boredom and cruelty, erectile dysfunction, and most of all, the spectre of “Kylie”, who cuts Young’s military service short (all Korean men are required to serve for 2 years). America as viewed through Park's Korean eyes is both a bewitching and malevolent force: mentions of America's dominant media culture and so-called liberal attitude towards queer people occur throughout the novel, but so does its existence as a colonial power and oppressor. It is, ultimately, America that is the source of both Kylie (Minogue) and "Kylie" (the malady).

I was particularly moved by “Jaehee”, the first novella in the quartet recounting the narrator's relationship with his best friend from his early twenties. It was a gorgeous depiction of both the casual devotion and the unkindness of close friendship, particularly between queer and straight people--how knowledge of queerness can both bring a pair together, as well as can be manipulated and weaponized, as well as how relinquishing a straight friend to straight life can leave a queer person feeling so lonely. It made me ache.

Park's later three novellas, which focus more around the narrator Park's queer romantic relationships, reminded me a lot of Bryan Washington in their affect and treatment of sex. It must have been both very courageous and very difficult for Park to put out this novel in South Korea; to be seen forever not only as a gay writer, but to be the country’s first one, especially in an environment still so conservative toward queerness. It’s also a gorgeous and acutely perceptive, if flawed, book in itself. I hope to be seeing more of Sang Young Park in translation in the years to come.

Love in the Big City was a thoughtful and fun read that explored themes of loneliness and relationships. Young was an engaging character and I enjoyed following his story throughout as he made mistakes and learned to live with them. There was a strong sense of realism to his relationships; meanwhile, Park Sang-Young's writing came across well in a nicely flowing translation. I had expected more from the ending, which is my only minor complaint. I don't know if a sequel is planned, but the way this book concluded left things a little too up in the air for my liking. Nonetheless, if you are looking for a book that looks joyfully at gay romance while not flinching away from some harsh realities of life, you will want to check out Love in the Big City.

I received this book as a free eBook ARC via NetGalley in exchange for an honest 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.

An tender story told in four parts exploring relationships (romantic, friendships, family) from the perspective of Young, our queer narrator. Park does a fantastic job examining Young's relationships with those he loves, for better or worse—his friendship with Jaehee who eventually gets married and moves out, his dying, irritable and illogically religious mother for whom he is a reluctant but diligent caretaker, a terrible man, and lastly one he falls into a deep, treasured relationship with. Park's voice is rich and distinctive, and he is a master at pulling us into the past without losing us in the present. I particularly loved his meditations on loneliness, the weariness of caretaking for a seemingly ungrateful parent, and wish we got some more of that in the book. This is definitely a reread. I'm really looking forward to reading more of Park's work—my only wish is that I could read it in Korean.

When was the last time a book reminded you of a song? While reading "Love in the big city",The Beatles "A day in the life" kept humming in my head. 

If you are a fan of East Asian writers, this is a must read for you. This South Korean author was so flawless with his words that it was hard to put down the book. The book was divided into 4 parts, each section was individually meaningful but the correlation of those chapters made the book as a whole. 

- Genre - Urban Fiction, Coming of age story
- Release Date - Nov 9, 2021 (English-language debut )

Read the book - 

☘️  If you want to be the part of an unforgettable friendship and love in the “big city” of Seoul and part of Bangkok. 
☘️  If you want to explore some independent characters as each of them knew about their true shape of desires and what they really want in life. Each of them came out with their emotions despite crazy social norms.
☘️  If you want to be the part of a brilliantly written novel filled both humor and emotion. Love in the Big City is an exploration of millennial loneliness as well as the joys of queer life. 

Thank you so much Grove Atlantic for sending an ARC copy towards my way. 

Thanks,
Tanjim