Posts filed under 'writing cities'

A Portrait of Twenty-First-Century Seoul: An Interview with Sang Young Park, Author of Love in the Big City

January 26, 2022  |  in Interviews  |  by Rose Bialer

I just happen to think the ugliness of love is just as close to the essence of love as the beauty of it.

Sang Young Park’s English-language debut Love in The Big City follows Young, a queer man in search of love and meaning. An aspiring writer who drinks and dances the night away in Seoul’s gay clubs, Young tries to make sense of his life through short stories in the morning, watching anxiously as others around him seem to be growing up and leaving. After many unsuccessful dates and arrogant boyfriends, he finally meets the man who could be his soulmate, but the two must come to terms with the cruelty of reality. With dark and humorous prose translated from Korean by Anton Hur, Park navigates the messiness of friendship and dating while capturing the rawness of breakups. The result is a book as addictive as the pack of Marlboro Reds that Young and his roommate keep in their freezer. In our interview, translated by Hur over email, Park and I discuss writing about love, being a person in the twenty-first century, and finding inspiration in pop music.

Rose Bialer (RB): I don’t like the cliché of a setting in literature being viewed as another character. However, in Love in The Big City, Seoul seems to have a developed personality. It can come off as melancholy, exuberant, romantic, and—depending on its current mood—Seoul affects how the characters live and love. Since you live in Seoul, I wanted to ask how you experience the city. Like the characters in the book, has it changed how you interact with the world?

Sang Young Park (SYP): I think a person’s environment decides their character. I was born in a city called Daegu—one of the most conservative places in Korea. When I was a teenager, I dreamed of Seoul as a kind of platonic ideal; I arrived here in my twenties for college, and that’s when my life began for real. Living here has made me realize that I resemble Seoul—it’s multi-faceted and passionate and at the same time, a very lonely and bleak city. I think these are my own sensibilities, as well as sensibilities that are present in the novel.

RB: How would you say that the city affects how the characters both love and receive love?

SYP: Each “big city,” as they appear in the book, possesses different aspects. Seoul is complicated and crowded but lonely and sorrowful at the same time; Bangkok is like a Mecca for gays—that kind of thing. The characters’ situations shift according to where they are. I think there’s definitely an organic interaction between the characters and their settings.

RB: I wanted to talk about the book’s structure. It is written as four short stories which connect to form the compelling whole. Each section is set at a specific moment in the narrator’s life, spanning from the time he is in college to when he is in his thirties. What drew you to this narrative form?

SYP: I wanted to show a different kind of love in each chapter. Part One, through Jaehee, I wanted to show the love we call friendship; Part Two was maternal love, along with first love; Part Three romantic love; and Part Four about what remains after the end of love. Through the last chapter, I wanted to wrap up my thoughts on the previous chapters, so the entire book would be a treatise on love itself. I thought, by showing the various emotions the narrator feels as he encounters different people in his twenties, I could effectively show the changes a character goes through, and at the same time see the emotion of love from different angles through this structural choice. READ MORE…

Distance Shapes Memory: An Interview with Karla Suárez

May 13, 2021  |  in Interviews  |  by Dorothy Potter Snyder

In my case, at least, I look first, get muddy and sweaty, and walk away. Only then do I write.

As I coordinated this interview with Karla Suárez, I had the impression that she was in constant motion. She is an inveterate bike rider and, even while working, takes “virtual trips by pacing around [her] writing table.” Her abundant energy is evident both in her productive career (nine books and participation in no less than forty-two anthologies during the last decade and a half) and in her female characters, canny women who are the architects of their destinies.

For Suárez, the mind’s attempt to understand is best complemented by a strong dose of the physical, because the body offers its own truths: “The best thing to do is to make love,” declares brainy Julia, the protagonist of Havana Year Zero. “. . . not think, offer up the body, the body, the body, the body, to the point of exhaustion . . . and the next day another body, and not thinking, not thinking, not thinking.”

Suárez’s background as an electrical engineer and a classical guitarist is evident in her novels which have the timing, complexity, and structural elegance of the proverbial Swiss watch. She likes her chapters to be about the same length to offer the reader rhythmic consistency, and intertextual gems await the attentive reader. But she is also something of an imp. She likes to have fun—and so do her characters.

I started our interview with word association, just as friends Lucía and Circe do in Suárez’s second novel Viajera, and she played right along. Then we talked about writing about home through the twin lenses of time and distance.

— Dorothy Potter Snyder

Dorothy Potter Snyder (DPS): Let’s play word association.

Karla Suárez (KS): Okay.

DPS: City?

KS: Should have an ocean.

DPS: Ocean?

KS: Motion.

DPS: Body?

KS: Sweat.

DPS: Stranger?

KS: What I am sometimes.

DPS: People call you a Cuban writer, but above all you’re an urban writer, whether the setting is Havana, Mexico City, Sao Paolo, Rome, Paris, or Lisbon where you live now. Can you imagine writing a novel that doesn’t have anything to do with a city? Or are they—and Havana in particular—indispensable to you?

KS: Four novels (Silencios, La viajera, Habana año cero, El hijo del héroe) compose what I call “my Havana Symphony,” because the characters in them are either from Havana or live there. In those novels, I wanted to deal with themes that concern the country and the city where I was born and raised, a Havana that goes from the 1970s to the ’90s. They are independent stories, of course, but there are subtle links between them. For example, some secondary characters appear in more than one novel; there are scenes in which the protagonists of several novels meet without knowing each other; and there is an object (a backpack) that passes from one character to another and thus travels from novel to novel. I wanted to create a micro-world where my characters cross paths—and even I with them, because I also appear in a very subtle way (though not as a protagonist) in some of these stories. This symphony is now complete, and I’ve started another cycle. The story I’m writing now, for example, does not take place in Havana nor does it have anything special to do with the city. It’s part of a different symphony. READ MORE…