Every month, our literary critic puts a work through a kaleidoscope, collecting the images it projects and reconstructing their diffractions. Even if the flashes of genius turn out to be shards of glass.
A phenomenon when it was released in Korea, it was long in the selection of the’International Booker Prize in 2022 and the foreign Prix Médicis in 2024, Love in the big city recounts the sentimental tribulations of a student in Seoul. The book opens with a friendship, but we soon realize that everything in the narrator's life will be mixed and ambiguous, oscillating between affection and love, atony and melancholy. There will rarely be any flashes of brilliance or happiness, but rather relationships shrouded in accointances and terminations. Emotions that taste like under-brewed tea, passions that are too bitter, solitudes that are too diluted.
Read Love in the big city, It's like standing at a crossroads at night and watching romance streak across the streets like the flashing lights of signs and car headlights; it's like looking at silhouettes and heart movements, watching them fade into the distance and finally evaporate, diffused, in the halo of a convenience store.
While the plot of this novel is linear, its purpose is circular. The initial encounter is followed by daily life, then silences and separation. Young, the narrator, flirts with men from all walks of life, unable to build a stable life together. A relentless to-and-fro that no escape can mystify.
In these pages, feelings collide and soul mates fade away. The Korean novelist speaks to us of love and tenderness, without any rosewater scenes, but without denying himself the right to idealism either. Romanticism is to be found in modesty and reticence, in inner struggles and hidden disavowals.
Sang Young Park paints a portrait of a man at odds with himself, battling against his homosexuality as much as the idea of a couple, showing the difficulties of Korean youth in finding its place, hemmed in by the straitjacket of tradition. The author's prose acts like electrolysis: two beings are poured into the same environment, they come together, then a shock divides them. Under the camouflaged eye of the reader, distant but concerned.
In this way, the book is more like a collection of relational chronicles, a narrative diary, from which we glimpse slices of life, cracks and, above all, a lot of questioning. What is love? What makes up a relationship? And so many questions about the social pressure of the couple, shared expectations, the end of feelings...
With half-hearted humor, Sang Young Park tries to fit all the different ways of loving into just over 200 pages: selfless love, lasting love, erotic passion, deep friendship, frivolous love, familiar love and, above all, the essence of all: self-love.
With an air of Sally Rooney in Seoul, Love in the big city is a race after oneself, not after love. With one major omission: true love. Because true love is a matcha: seductive at first, then quickly muddy, it especially quickly leaves a graveyard smell in the mouth.
Quentin Perissinotto is an editor at Regard Libre.
You have just read an open-access column from our print edition (Le Regard Libre N°115). Debates, analyses, cultural news: subscribe to support us and get access to all our content!
Sang Young Park
Love in the big city
La Croisée
August 2024
272 pages
French 
German 
English