Also, the narrator is infuriatingly self-absorbed, seeming to regard other human beings as being there mainly for his convenience and amusement, and curiously incapable of empathy with them. Loosely autobiographical, the novel follows Young, a young gay man living in Seoul in the Noughties, as he studies, works, falls in and out of love and lust, makes friends, defines himself in relation to his controlling mother, and negotiates the rigid social structure of his homeland. As a translator, I am always interested in how writing reinvents itself in a different language and, given the profound linguistic and cultural differences between South Korea and the anglophone world, I was as keen to see how translator Anton Hur dealt with the text as I read Sang Young Park’s debut novel, Love in the Big City.Īlthough I should, in theory, identify with “queer lit”, it is not a genre which has particularly drawn me.
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