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A review by eggmama
Pavane for a Dead Princess by Min-gyu Park, Amber Hyun Jung Kim
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."