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atilh's review against another edition
emotional
reflective
sad
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.75
waltzsofa's review
dark
emotional
hopeful
reflective
sad
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
4.75
eggmama's review
4.0
I'd like to petition for a new "blurb" or description of this book. The current one reads:
Based on the tone of this blurb, I expected satire. What I got instead was a piercing and poignant coming-of-age love story that addresses capitalism, beauty, love, suicide, literature, and friendship... and I could not be happier about it.
Our nameless narrator starts the story nineteen years old, working as a valet of sorts for a department store in Korea in 1985. There, he meets Yohan, a strange guy who ends up becoming his best friend. It's also where he meets Her, a woman that he finds compelling, despite everyone else's perceptions of her (herself included). What follows is a quiet yet charged story between these three characters as they find and lose their places in the world and next to each other.
I've said it before, I'll say it again: books rarely make me feel that romantic love exists between characters. I know it's there, I know it's supposed to be there, it just doesn't translate for me into actual feelings. So when it happens, it's rare and, though it seems hyperbolic to say, beautiful. In all of the books where I have truly felt love between characters (cough cough The Elegance of the Hedgehog, The Song of Achilles, Hunting & Gathering), friendship is the strong base on which everything else is built. Pavane for a Dead Princess is no different in this regard. The friendship between the narrator, the woman, and Yohan is at times silly, at times dark, but formed on a mutual need and understanding.
This book is existential and a little tragic and filled with yearning and insecurities and young adult angst and lofty observations about the world and pop culture references and beautiful prose.
So much of this book is saying, "The miracle isn't love itself. The miracle is that love can happen at all in a world like this, between two unremarkable people."
Park Min-gyu has been celebrated and condemned for his attacks upon what he perceives as the humorlessness of contemporary Korean literature. Pavane for a Dead Princess is his attack upon the beauty-fetish that reigns over popular culture, detailing the relationship between a man with matinee-idol good looks and "the ugliest woman of the century."
Based on the tone of this blurb, I expected satire. What I got instead was a piercing and poignant coming-of-age love story that addresses capitalism, beauty, love, suicide, literature, and friendship... and I could not be happier about it.
Our nameless narrator starts the story nineteen years old, working as a valet of sorts for a department store in Korea in 1985. There, he meets Yohan, a strange guy who ends up becoming his best friend. It's also where he meets Her, a woman that he finds compelling, despite everyone else's perceptions of her (herself included). What follows is a quiet yet charged story between these three characters as they find and lose their places in the world and next to each other.
I've said it before, I'll say it again: books rarely make me feel that romantic love exists between characters. I know it's there, I know it's supposed to be there, it just doesn't translate for me into actual feelings. So when it happens, it's rare and, though it seems hyperbolic to say, beautiful. In all of the books where I have truly felt love between characters (cough cough The Elegance of the Hedgehog, The Song of Achilles, Hunting & Gathering), friendship is the strong base on which everything else is built. Pavane for a Dead Princess is no different in this regard. The friendship between the narrator, the woman, and Yohan is at times silly, at times dark, but formed on a mutual need and understanding.
This book is existential and a little tragic and filled with yearning and insecurities and young adult angst and lofty observations about the world and pop culture references and beautiful prose.
So much of this book is saying, "The miracle isn't love itself. The miracle is that love can happen at all in a world like this, between two unremarkable people."
apollosmichioreads's review
5.0
This is an utterly romantic and beautifully-written novel that exceeded my expectations. Featuring a love story between a handsome guy and an ugly woman, this book is bolstered by its illuminating commentary on capitalism, paperchase, and the demanding beauty standards in Korea. For some, it might be a little slow-paced, but this allows the reader time to ruminate on the themes addressed in the story. Poignant and nostalgic, this is the best romance novel I read this year (so far) and I recommend it to anyone looking for a good love story. I particularly found the ending tear-jerking and unforgettable.
ccmontgom's review
5.0
Nobody, in a slow and deliberate love story, can as savagely attack the narrowness and superficial nature of society as fashioned by capitalism as Park Min-gyu. If [b:Is That So? I'm a Giraffe|23437331|Is That So? I'm a Giraffe (Modern Korean Literature 034)|Min-gyu Park|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1414025041s/23437331.jpg|43002102] laid bare the era in which people were merely input - cogs in a machine and treated that way - Pavane does an even more flaying job on the skin-deep nature of of a world in which money has been aestheticized and aesthetics, in the traditional sense, are judge only by monetary worth.
Pavane is about a triad of friends: Yohan the man who can make seemingly anything into a metaphor or argument against the superficiality of the world; The handsome young man, the son of an actor who left the family for success; and "the ugliest woman in the world."
The latter two fall in love, and the rest of the book is combination of their biographies after a horrible circumstance separates them, memories of the times the three friends spent together, and conversations that go to places you would never expect (e.g. how rectum folds would become incredibly important in a world in which everyone was attractive).
As usual in Park's work, while all is gloom in the world as it exists, better possibilities are out there, and Park, in a kind of "director's cut(s)" of an ending shows how this might work.
Park's style is deft, hard-hitting, and brief, all of which makes reading Pavane quite easy despite its oftentimes grim subject matter.
[b:Pavane for a Dead Princess|22344205|Pavane for a Dead Princess|Min-gyu Park|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1402054117s/22344205.jpg|41743010] is in direct competition with [b:No One Writes Back|17591572|No One Writes Back|Jang Eun-Jin|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1379899813s/17591572.jpg|24532485] for the best book of the Dalkey Archive / LTI Korea series, and it makes me extremely eager to see what excellent books await us next year.
Pavane is about a triad of friends: Yohan the man who can make seemingly anything into a metaphor or argument against the superficiality of the world; The handsome young man, the son of an actor who left the family for success; and "the ugliest woman in the world."
The latter two fall in love, and the rest of the book is combination of their biographies after a horrible circumstance separates them, memories of the times the three friends spent together, and conversations that go to places you would never expect (e.g. how rectum folds would become incredibly important in a world in which everyone was attractive).
As usual in Park's work, while all is gloom in the world as it exists, better possibilities are out there, and Park, in a kind of "director's cut(s)" of an ending shows how this might work.
Park's style is deft, hard-hitting, and brief, all of which makes reading Pavane quite easy despite its oftentimes grim subject matter.
[b:Pavane for a Dead Princess|22344205|Pavane for a Dead Princess|Min-gyu Park|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1402054117s/22344205.jpg|41743010] is in direct competition with [b:No One Writes Back|17591572|No One Writes Back|Jang Eun-Jin|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1379899813s/17591572.jpg|24532485] for the best book of the Dalkey Archive / LTI Korea series, and it makes me extremely eager to see what excellent books await us next year.
arirang's review
3.0
"All love is founded on myth, the myth that you love him, that's he somehow different from other guys, that she's this type of girl, that you mean everything to him, that you understand everything about him, that she's terribly beautiful, that he'll never change, that he needs you, that he's lonely, that you'll love her forever. They're all mistaken beliefs.
Yet those who find love in spite of the ugly truth are those who have decided to believe the good rather than the bad. That was the kind of love we had."
죽은 왕녀를 위한 파반느 was published by 박민규 in 2009 and translated into English by Amber Hyun Jung Kim as part of the wonderful Dalkey Archive Library of Korean Literature.
It didn't quite work for me - perhaps because at a personal level I buy-in to the South Korean modern culture that it so bluntly critiques, and neither am I a fan of adolescent love stories - but I can appreciate why it has attracted 5* reviews from other reviewers who I respect (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1089458090).
The story begins with a tearful reunion between the (unnamed) narrator and his (also unnamed) girlfriend, on his 20th birthday in 1986. The novel takes it's title from Ravel's "Pavane pour une infante défunte", which the girl offers to the narrator as a gift, although even before that he intuits that, when they embrace, "her body felt like a lifeless princess".
The meeting was both their first for many months, and their last. The bulk of the rest of the novel circles back to explain how they had come to this point, while a brief coda at the end explains why it was their last meeting (with a surprising, and for me overly melodramatic, plot twist) and then also offers an alternative's "authors cut" (again, to me overly sentimental).
As suggested above the novel functions both as an adolscent first-love story and a polemic against mid-1980s Korean culture. The following - lengthy but abridged - excerpt comes early on as scene-setting:
"In 1985, Madonna's face was everywhere. There were poster of her face staring straight ahead, her face in profile, her head tilted back, her eyes half closed, maybe with one finger coquettishly in her mouth. Of course this pattern repeated itself every year, with a different girl. Someone unspeakably beautiful - an angel, really - would come from nowhere and her very presence captured everyone's hearts. Even when the oil shock gripped the world in 1979 or when the two world wars erupted or when the Great Depression hit, even in nineteenth-century England and fifteen-century China, even in ancient Rome and Greece, the same must have occurred....1985 was also full of ugly women. Humans have always needed an ugliness they could look upon with complete contempt, and 1985 was no exception.
It was also a year average people suddenly came into money. It was the age of real estate, the stock market, and the huge bubble expanding over the economy. Suddenly, there were people scrambling around unsure what to do with their newfound wealth, people who were intensely jealous but didn't want to admit it, people who suddenly felt foolish about working for their money, people who only then realised being poor was a crime, people who waited in line all night with their bank accounts for housing applications to get a piece of the real estate pie, people who understood they were treated differently depending on the size of their car...people who woke up to the realisation that labels and brand names represented who they were, people who scrawled a Nike swoosh on their sneakers and envied those with the authentic Nikes...
Many people were forced into oblivion in the face of that new world, which feels to be like it was yesterday. I'm talking about shopkeeprs who were constantly fingering the beads on their abacus, kids who drank milk out of glass bottles with a paper cork, poor middle-aged women who looked effectively genderless, older men who biked up narrow winding slopes of their neighbourhood, families living in tiny rented rooms who were knocked unconscious by coal-gas poisoning..."
Park's focus is the middle 95%, who are neither beautiful nor rich, but not the ugly or poor either, and how they get sucked into a culture that strives to achieve both wealth and physical perfection (South Korea is famed for the high level of plastic surgery), yet ultimately chasing a moving and unattainable target, and largely to the benefit of the top 1%. Rather oddly he has chosen to make the female character part of the bottom few % - the narrator's first impression on his to-be girlfriend is that she is "extraordinarily ugly".
In betweeen anti-consumerist polemics, the love story of the novel comprises rather banal and overwrought conversation, interspersed with occassional poetic asides ("Ears are organs shaped with dizzying curves, sculptures formed by someone's whispered breath"). To be fair to Park, it does capture well the adolescent voice, but it doesn't make for great literature - another Korean novel I read this year had a similar issue (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1156705841).
And at times the novel seems a bit too Murakamiesque (particularly Norwegian Wood), featuring a loner male-narrator, with a cat, a prediliction for Beatles records and a penchant for spending time in a bar.
There are some odd stylistic quirks - some of the direct speech (but not all) in a fainter font, and odd paragraph spacing - seemingly purely for effect, and Park (and I'm sure it is him, not the translator) has also included a number of gratuituous footnotes - for example when in their reunion at a restaurant the girl says "It feels like we're in Kentucky Chicken", a footnote explains "Name of the bar the two frequented", something that is pretty obvious from context and from reading on. This puzzled me throughout the book and the explanation appears to be that it's a rather clumsy hint of a meta-narrative by someone other than the ostensible narrator, foreshadowing the "author's cut".
The translation certainly reads well, although Amber Hyun Jung Kim obviously struggled with one Korean joke - when the narrator names his cat Saint-Expury, after the author of Little Prince, because it sounds like mouse (one needs to know this in Korean in 생쥐 - saeng-jui - one place a footnote might have been useful!).
All the above being said, it is a compelling read, genuinely moving (the love story) and hard-hitting (on consumerist culture, in Korea and the 1980s particularly) at the same time.
Yet those who find love in spite of the ugly truth are those who have decided to believe the good rather than the bad. That was the kind of love we had."
죽은 왕녀를 위한 파반느 was published by 박민규 in 2009 and translated into English by Amber Hyun Jung Kim as part of the wonderful Dalkey Archive Library of Korean Literature.
It didn't quite work for me - perhaps because at a personal level I buy-in to the South Korean modern culture that it so bluntly critiques, and neither am I a fan of adolescent love stories - but I can appreciate why it has attracted 5* reviews from other reviewers who I respect (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1089458090).
The story begins with a tearful reunion between the (unnamed) narrator and his (also unnamed) girlfriend, on his 20th birthday in 1986. The novel takes it's title from Ravel's "Pavane pour une infante défunte", which the girl offers to the narrator as a gift, although even before that he intuits that, when they embrace, "her body felt like a lifeless princess".
The meeting was both their first for many months, and their last. The bulk of the rest of the novel circles back to explain how they had come to this point, while a brief coda at the end explains why it was their last meeting (with a surprising, and for me overly melodramatic, plot twist) and then also offers an alternative's "authors cut" (again, to me overly sentimental).
As suggested above the novel functions both as an adolscent first-love story and a polemic against mid-1980s Korean culture. The following - lengthy but abridged - excerpt comes early on as scene-setting:
"In 1985, Madonna's face was everywhere. There were poster of her face staring straight ahead, her face in profile, her head tilted back, her eyes half closed, maybe with one finger coquettishly in her mouth. Of course this pattern repeated itself every year, with a different girl. Someone unspeakably beautiful - an angel, really - would come from nowhere and her very presence captured everyone's hearts. Even when the oil shock gripped the world in 1979 or when the two world wars erupted or when the Great Depression hit, even in nineteenth-century England and fifteen-century China, even in ancient Rome and Greece, the same must have occurred....1985 was also full of ugly women. Humans have always needed an ugliness they could look upon with complete contempt, and 1985 was no exception.
It was also a year average people suddenly came into money. It was the age of real estate, the stock market, and the huge bubble expanding over the economy. Suddenly, there were people scrambling around unsure what to do with their newfound wealth, people who were intensely jealous but didn't want to admit it, people who suddenly felt foolish about working for their money, people who only then realised being poor was a crime, people who waited in line all night with their bank accounts for housing applications to get a piece of the real estate pie, people who understood they were treated differently depending on the size of their car...people who woke up to the realisation that labels and brand names represented who they were, people who scrawled a Nike swoosh on their sneakers and envied those with the authentic Nikes...
Many people were forced into oblivion in the face of that new world, which feels to be like it was yesterday. I'm talking about shopkeeprs who were constantly fingering the beads on their abacus, kids who drank milk out of glass bottles with a paper cork, poor middle-aged women who looked effectively genderless, older men who biked up narrow winding slopes of their neighbourhood, families living in tiny rented rooms who were knocked unconscious by coal-gas poisoning..."
Park's focus is the middle 95%, who are neither beautiful nor rich, but not the ugly or poor either, and how they get sucked into a culture that strives to achieve both wealth and physical perfection (South Korea is famed for the high level of plastic surgery), yet ultimately chasing a moving and unattainable target, and largely to the benefit of the top 1%. Rather oddly he has chosen to make the female character part of the bottom few % - the narrator's first impression on his to-be girlfriend is that she is "extraordinarily ugly".
In betweeen anti-consumerist polemics, the love story of the novel comprises rather banal and overwrought conversation, interspersed with occassional poetic asides ("Ears are organs shaped with dizzying curves, sculptures formed by someone's whispered breath"). To be fair to Park, it does capture well the adolescent voice, but it doesn't make for great literature - another Korean novel I read this year had a similar issue (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1156705841).
And at times the novel seems a bit too Murakamiesque (particularly Norwegian Wood), featuring a loner male-narrator, with a cat, a prediliction for Beatles records and a penchant for spending time in a bar.
There are some odd stylistic quirks - some of the direct speech (but not all) in a fainter font, and odd paragraph spacing - seemingly purely for effect, and Park (and I'm sure it is him, not the translator) has also included a number of gratuituous footnotes - for example when in their reunion at a restaurant the girl says "It feels like we're in Kentucky Chicken", a footnote explains "Name of the bar the two frequented", something that is pretty obvious from context and from reading on. This puzzled me throughout the book and the explanation appears to be that it's a rather clumsy hint of a meta-narrative by someone other than the ostensible narrator, foreshadowing the "author's cut".
The translation certainly reads well, although Amber Hyun Jung Kim obviously struggled with one Korean joke - when the narrator names his cat Saint-Expury, after the author of Little Prince, because it sounds like mouse (one needs to know this in Korean in 생쥐 - saeng-jui - one place a footnote might have been useful!).
All the above being said, it is a compelling read, genuinely moving (the love story) and hard-hitting (on consumerist culture, in Korea and the 1980s particularly) at the same time.
claire_reads_books's review
5.0
Goddamn, this book 😭❤️ Set in 1980s Seoul amid the commercial spoils of Korea’s industrial boom, Pavane for a Dead Princess is both a polemic against the fetishization of material wealth and physical beauty and a tender account of the brief, cautious romance between a handsome parking lot attendant and the breathtakingly ugly woman he falls for. Come for the star-crossed love story, stay for the postmodern existential dread and the beauty and agony of youth—and for the last 30 pages, which take an unexpected turn that will make you want to go back and read the whole book all over again. It also might make you cry alone in your apartment at 1am, who’s to say.
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