This novel is a composite of four pieces that bleed into each other. Han Kang’s Vegetarian is a comparable case. A juxtaposition of stories, somehow morphed into one. This is why many reviews of Love in the Big City point out inconsistencies, though some maintain that in the end everything falls into place. The four stories are only loosely interconnected and several details about the biographical circumstances of the hero, like family or work, are not streamlined. There is some overall trajectory, but reading this collection of stories as just one work is bound to create frustration.

Now, the German translation does not contain the author’s afterword that explains that the narrator of all four parts is “simultaneously the same person and different people”—not very satisfying but of utmost importance. The Korean original even contains information about the publication venues of the four stories, and on the cover of the book, it is declared a yeonjak soseol. The publisher Suhrkamp decided to withhold this crucial information from German readers. Why? Well, yeonjak soseol is admittedly a genre not known in the German-speaking world. The term could be rendered as a “serial” or “omnibus,” but this would be misleading. That this ended up being called a “novel” was perhaps a compromise. But obviously, it leads readers up the garden path and does the book a disservice.

As for the first story of Love in the Big City, I was hooked by its witty beginning, but this impression faded. There is a flippancy and hedonistic carelessness here that I find only semi-funny, and the superficial reflection is unsophisticated in the extreme: “Jaehee learned that living as a gay was sometimes truly shitty, and I learned that living as a woman wasn’t much better.”

Much stronger is the second story. The narrator describes his troubled intimate relationship with an older former student activist, an anti-American intellectual who cannot accept his own queerness. Falling in love with said man, the narrator reflects: “My thoughts were full of things he might be interested in. I felt my sensitivity to the world around me heightening.” Quite a development considering that the protagonist of the first story declared his contempt for self-awareness (“a disease in itself”). A major sideshow is the hero’s travails with his cancer-ailing mother, an ardent Christian, whose only way to relate to her son’s homosexuality is denial.

Literature opens our eyes for the riches of embarrassment, as humiliations often prove more fecund for narration than victories. The first story does not offer much in that regard, except for a botched congratulatory song at a wedding. But the second story contains scenes like, the hero helping his mother on the toilet, only to be thanked with, “I should have had a daughter.”

After the overfucked but underloved bravado of the first story, we encounter hints at vulnerability—partly due to the queer condition—and much talk about loneliness. The lousy sex life of the narrator and his friend is recapitulated with a good dose of tragicomedy. The couple accepts the need for condoms because one of them carries an STI, but rolling on a condom entails erectile dysfunction on the part of the friend “really every time,” and the side effects from taking Viagra prove too heavy. Likewise, the relationship described (from different angles) in the third and fourth stories is characterized by a paucity of sex. Somehow this frailty lends itself better to reflection, consciousness, and self-exploration. This compensates for a psychological shallowness that sometimes baffles—as when the narrator recalls the day when he was discharged from military service as follows: “The only three things floating around in my brain were iced Americano, Kylie Minogue, and sex.”

Pop music references are all over this book (a full soundtrack, altogether), as is laughter. Every now and then, the hero bursts into laughter, has a fit of laughter, cannot repress his urge to laugh, etc. But almost never is this triggered by something irresistibly hilarious (so that I would join in automatically). One of the most telling hysterics happens when a Malay, one of the hero’s countless bedpartners, asks about the meaning of jeok-pye-cheong-san, a slogan he heard from Korean demonstrators. The “eradication of deep-rooted evils” was former president Moon Jae-in’s signature campaign. The foreigner’s distortion of the Korean syllables may be ludicrous, but the ensuing fit of laughter comes across as disproportionate. What shines through here, is the hero’s apolitical disenchantment—his nickname “Garfield,” originally referring to being overweight, thus gains an additional layer of deeper meaning.

This is not the kind of writing that warrants close reading and the savoring of intricately crafted periodic sentences. But I have moved gradually towards appreciating some merits of this book, which are in my view not well covered by the ballyhoo with which it is promoted.

 

Translator, Castella (Praesens, 2020) by Park Min-gyu

Professor, Department of Korean Studies, Palacký University Olomouc, Czech Republic