Prologue: New Town
Chapter 1: Elegant Pilates
Chapter 2 Buil Hospital
Chapter 3: Internal Medicine
Chapter 4 Big Guy Jim
Chapter 5 Sorae Port
Chapter 6 Master View
Chapter 7 Peak Point
Chapter 8 Deokjeokdo
Judges' Comments (Eun Hee-kyung, Jeon Seong-tae, Lee Ki-ho, Pyeon Hye-young, Baek Ga-heum, Choi Jin-young, Park Jun)
Author's Note

★14th Honbul Literary Award Winner★
★Recommended by Eun Hee-kyung, Jeon Seong-tae, Lee Ki-ho, Pyeon Hye-young, Baek Ga-heum, Choi Jin-young, and Park Jun★

Is this a city you want to live in, a city you want to survive in?
Another city view behind the dazzling forest of buildings

“This novel asks us:
“What’s at the bottom of you?” - Novelist Jinyoung Choi

The 14th Honbul Literary Award-winning work, “City View,” has been published.
If last year's award-winning novel, "A World to Protect," by Moon Kyung-min, dealt with themes such as the decline of religious authority, disability, and caregiving, leaving a profound impression, "City View" meticulously portrays the portrait of today's urbanites who struggle to lead smooth lives on the outside while suffering from obsession, deprivation, self-harm, industrial accidents, and trauma.
It was selected as this year's winner with rave reviews for "excellently revealing the desires and wounds of various classes that make up a city, from the financially stable middle-aged middle class to young workers in their twenties and thirties who eke out an unstable livelihood, through three-dimensional and complex characters."
This novel, which depicts the vulgar state of affairs as it is without turning a blind eye to reality, appears to have a veneer of popular appeal.
But within it, the question lurks gravely: “What is beneath you?”
This work is in line with last year's award-winning work in that it poses the essential and unavoidable questions of our time in a solid and experienced style.

The Honbul Literary Award, now in its 14th year, was established to revive the immortal spirit of humanity depicted in the late Choi Myeong-hee's epic novel, Honbul.
The most active writers currently leading Korean literature, including Eun Hee-kyung, Jeon Seong-tae, Lee Gi-ho, Pyeon Hye-young, Baek Ga-heum, Choi Jin-young, and Park Jun, will directly judge the entries, and the winning writer will be awarded a prize of 70 million won.
This year, out of a whopping 282 novels submitted, a new writer's novel, "City View," was selected.
The award-winning author, Woo Shin-young, has been teaching literature for a long time and has been honing his own writing style.
This year marks the time when he finally reveals to the world the stories he has been keeping to himself for so long.
Author Woo Shin-young, who not only won the 14th Honbul Literary Award for “City View” but also the 30th Golden Toad Award for her children’s story “Always Affectionate Jukjip,” has now made her name known to readers of all ages.

“Is Yuhwa eating razor blades an eating disorder?
“Is it possible that Sumi, who eats up other people’s gaze, has an eating disorder?”

The “petty immorality” of city dwellers that cannot be easily divided or categorized

Songdo, a city built by reclaiming the sea.
The novel is set in a new city where there are more Pilates centers than convenience stores, and where it is difficult to see an elderly person even if you walk around all day long, and where dizzyingly tall glass buildings form a giant forest.
Like the ocean buried beneath a forest of skyscrapers, desire always lurks beneath the noble masks of city dwellers.
Seok-jin, a doctor, and Sumi, the director of a Pilates center, also hide their desires and deficiencies from each other, but on the surface, they maintain a stable married life.
For example, Sumi continues to meet her younger boyfriend, a fitness trainer in his twenties, without telling her husband, but this is nothing more than a “minor immorality.”
Then one day, when Yu-hwa, a worker from an industrial complex on the outskirts of the city, appears at the hospital in the city center, which is the occupied territory of Soo-mi and Seok-jin, another secret begins to emerge between the couple.

In that they tell deliberate lies, the characters in City View are all somewhat immoral, regardless of class.
But as you read the novel, it becomes difficult to simply criticize them.
Because no one is free from the deficiencies and wounds hidden deep in their hearts.
As poet Park Jun commented, this novel, which “observes delicately yet does not reveal any hypocrisy or falsehood,” takes the premise that everyone is different on the inside and out and ultimately depicts an ironic urban landscape where everyone feels lonely.
What lies at the heart of the novel's ultimate goal is nothing other than compassion for universal humanity.

"Songdo will now be named the new home of Korean novels." - Novelist Pyeon Hye-young

As novelist Eun Hee-kyung said in her review, “In ‘City View,’ space is the theme of the novel,” what stands out in this novel is the symbolism of space.
The characteristics of key locations are actively utilized as elements of the narrative and provide solid support for each character's inner self.
The state-of-the-art, stateless city, built on mudflats rather than solid ground, is read as a space that embodies “the false consciousness of our time” (novelist Jeon Seong-tae) and “the desires of the newly formed middle class in Korean society” (novelist Baek Ga-heum).
The novel deliberately contrasts the city center with its outskirts, meticulously illuminating the different aspects of life within a single space. Furthermore, it dramatically juxtaposes the life of someone who enjoys climbing a fake rock wall with the life of someone who must risk their life clinging to the exterior of a building to clean windows.
The high-rise building, which allows only vertical perspectives from the ground up, becomes a space that hints at the world of achievement and the gap between classes, while also encompassing the narrative of Haeryong, a Korean-Chinese worker who is in a blind spot of safety.


“Because what we see is our livelihood.”
A body suffering from obsession with appearance and a body suffering from physical labor
Stories of all kinds of 'bodies' that perfectly reflect this era.

Among the many spaces depicted in this novel, the 'hospital' in particular functions as a place where the lives of various classes intersect.
The life of a wealthy person who runs a hospital, the life of an eating disorder that requires extreme diet control due to an obsession with appearance, the life of a manual laborer who frequently has to go to the hospital due to industrial accidents, and the life of a person who repeatedly self-harms because there is no way to relieve the inner pain.
A hospital is almost the only place where all kinds of lives can gather, and the traces of each life are etched entirely on the 'body'.
As novelist Lee Ki-ho pointed out, “City View” is ultimately “a novel about the body, pushed forward with the body.”
While vowing, “I won’t let my children be judged by their bodies,” Sumi’s persistent judgment of others’ bodies could be seen as the very definition of the contemporary perspective.
The image of Juni, a twenty-something health trainer who replaces all her meals with 1,300 won chicken breasts, unable to escape the worry of “what will I eat to survive once this body shrinks?” perfectly reflects the modern people struggling to survive in an age where appearances are the center of everything.
In that respect, novelist Lee Ki-ho evaluated 『City View』 as follows.
“Just as the topography of the body changes with the times, we always need a new narrative of the body.
“The drama is here.”

Author's Note

People who clean the glass for a clear, unobstructed view of the city and people who climb the fake rock wall to safely feel the thrill.
By the definition of parallel, they never seemed to brush against each other.
I just couldn't swallow that fact.
I felt nauseous.
That was the beginning of this novel.