Review of Pavane for a Dead Princess by Park Min-gyu

*Pavane for a Dead Princess* by Park Min-gyu, translated by Amber Hyun Jung Kim (2014). Published by Dalkey Archive Press.

If you’re new here and stumbled on this blog through the mythical and magical powers of the Internet, or because of whatever the search engines decided was going to show up today when you Google something, welcome! My name is Ashley, and I made this blog in addition to my author/writer portfolio because I wanted to remember all of the books, shows, and movies I was coming across throughout the years.

I read and watch a lot, and I used to work as a professional film critic on the side when I was in graduate school. While I loved going to film festivals and ploughing through 500 pages of readings a week, on top of my regular fiction and nonfiction TBR list, I wasn’t remembering everything at the end of the day.

So I started writing little reviews and posts to keep an archive. It’s also pretty fun to return to a book or movie after a few years, then come to this website to see what I thought about it originally. One could call this a mind map, especially as you can literally track changes in the way we think throughout a set period of time through this kind of work.

Anyways, it was the Fall of 2024 when I fell into a period of unemployment that was pretty unexpected. I took a hard look at my finances and realized I had enough to take off for some time, so I did. It was such an incredible privilege to do so, especially in this economy and state of the world. I focused a bit on my blog and traveling during this time, and I would say it was so worth it.

If you liked what you read here, feel free to click around. I make a few pennies here and there from the ads that hover in the corner of your screen, so it helps out during periods like this.

Korean literature forever and always has been my home base. It’s one of the national literatures I read the most, and I did my entire master’s thesis on colonial and postcolonial Korean women’s literature. Korean books are the focus of the book aspect of this blog, although they can be a little harder to find versus the US-based books. I live in the US, but it’s slowly changing how we’re getting access to international books.

Pavane for a Dead Princess is a book I’ve been meaning to read for a while now, but never got around to. I collect copies of The Library of Korean Literature when I travel, and so far I’ve about four or five copies of books from this series. Some of the ones I want are a little harder to find, so I might have to resort to the Internet.

But I recently (at the time of typing this—I suspect my blog post will come out much later) acquired a copy of Pavane for a Dead Princess, and I flew through reading this one. It was a wild ride, that’s for sure.

Let’s get into the review! I don’t want to ramble too much, as I know introductions can get quite lengthy.

In 1980s Korea, a national obsession with beauty rears its ugly head.

So if you’re unfamiliar with Korean history in recent years, I suggest doing some basic Googling before going into this book, especially what the 1980s looked like. It’ll add to your experience, but the nutshell version is that back then, Korea was going through a series of brutal dictatorships, and then there was rapid industrialization.

Many of Korea’s problems today can be traced to not only colonization, but the idea of rapid industrialization causing things to happen too quickly, leading to the “quick, quick, quick / 빨리, 빨리, 빨리” attitude that is quite common. This is an oversimplification, as we can read and cite so many academic sources on this.

Anyways, Pavane for a Dead Princess (which is a reference to a specific musical work) is about a man with divine looks. He’s the ideal beauty standard here in Korea, and he is on a high horse because of it. It’s while working at a local department store he meets a girl that stands out in a different way.

He describes her as truly ugly, which is an awful thing to read in some ways. That’s why he notices her at first, but this is a book about critiquing the rigid standards of beauty that exist in Korean culture and society. A passage that stood out to me is about how for many Koreans, the path in front of them is laid out.

And how you get to that path is determined by looks. Even today, in South Korea, resumes are submitted for jobs along with a headshot of the individual. That’s a pretty scary thought to me as an outsider, as appearances really shouldn’t be a factor in how people are hired or determined fit for the job, especially for women.

But in the world these characters are living in, there’s an acknowledgement about how first impressions determine how people are seen and presented opportunities. Here we have a man with the looks of a movie star, and then there’s a woman who is considered to be incredibly ugly.

Yet, at the same time, they’re dating, which probably will have many people confused when they see them. We kind of get the sense that this isn’t going to work out early on, but in-between the narrator’s friend Yohan rambling about how superficial everyone is, we can’t help but to hope they’ll break the status quo.

This is all juxtaposed with the rampant consumerism going on, which, as we can imagine, has probably gotten worse in recent years.

Overall Thoughts

This is such a good book, and if you’ve never read Korean literature before, this actually might be a great place to start. It’s a satire and critique of a very contemporary issue, and as I mentioned before, this is probably intensified in the job hunt and even with social media. I was watching Single’s Inferno for the first time the other day and really got these vibes from that show alone.

Anyways, the writing is really good in this one. It didn’t hit me as hard as a another Library of Korean Literature book, No One Writes Back, but it’s still quite effective in its characterization and how it gets its ideas across. I flew through my copy of the book over the course of a few hours, which means I was pretty invested in getting this one done.

I say pick this one up if you’re interested! It might be trickier to find in a standard bookstore, but if you can find it, I suggest picking it up while you have the chance.

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