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2.72 AVERAGE
2.72 AVERAGE
As a work of postmodern fiction, "All Those Vanished Engines" has a plot twisted in on itself and layered on top of itself, full of self-referential winks and dream-like asides. Is it science fiction? If pressed, I would call it classic magical realism. The reader is never quite sure how much of the weird stuff has actually happened and how much has been created, dreamed, or hallucinated by the narrator(s). The story is told in three parts. Names, places, and events weave in and out of these parts, each of which comment on the family history of the narrator of the second and third parts. The first section almost stands alone as a piece of alternate history fiction, until it's subverted two-thirds of the way through by the intrusion of sci-fi tropes. The second section tells the heartbreaking story of a writer trying to decide what to do with his ailing father and autistic sister after his mother has died. His fragile emotional state is further aggravated by both his painful family history and his relationship with a student of his who is writing a work of fiction that, unbeknownst to her, mirrors his own childhood. The final part of the book takes place in the near-future. The narrator from the middle portion is now an old man, but has returned to the abandoned library of a ravaged city to find out why his life seems to be cursed. The connecting threads of these tales contain ghosts, aliens, lost manuscripts, hidden jewels, and a Civil War event called "The Battle of the Crater," which may or may not have had supernatural significance. Behind all of the narrative gymnastics, Paul Park has written a haunting work about how the decisions of the past, made by family members long dead, inevitably effect our own life and future in ways we will never be able to understand. The researcher and genealogist may uncover pieces of the map, but most of the connecting roads will remain shrouded in the shadow of story.
I only read half the book, and that was mostly with confusion and dislike. I finally just couldn't do it anymore. There were glimpses of interesting and well-written work, but not enough to hold me. I think he tried to do something very different, and it just didn't work for me. I wish he had written it straighter because I think he has a lovely voice when he is using it in a language I understand.
“It’s all meta-fiction, all the time.”
“I always warned students against complexity for its own sake, and to consider the virtues of the simple story, simply told.”
These two quotes sum up what I found both fascinating and frustrating about this short novel of three inter-linked meta-narratives by Paul Park. On the one hand, Park rather dazzlingly conveys not only the potential of the written word, but the plasticity of the novel format itself.
We are so habituated to traditional narrative formats that any form of meta-fiction (simply understood as a recursive story, where the beginning and ending are enfolded into a Möbius Strip of multiple beginnings and endings) often takes us out of our comfort zone as readers.
As soon as we have to ‘work’ at a text in order to extract its meaning, the compact between author and reader changes, I think, where the reader becomes a far more active (and culpable?) creator of that particular text and its embedded meaning.
It is not that simple though, for on the other hand, meta-fiction often engages multiple levels of irony and various sleight-of-hand tricks to frustrate the reader in his or her quest for meaning. I think the main aim of this is to force the reader into thinking differently about how the text itself functions as a discrete unit, and the (sometimes contradictory) roles that the author and reader play in this process.
I say ‘contradictory’, because the main bugbear with meta-fiction is this: any reader not habituated to this particular form is unlikely to find any kind of conventional narrative satisfaction or resolution here; and hence is unlikely to read such a book, which defeats the stated purpose of educating readers into reading differently and thinking about texts differently.
The other problem I have with meta-fiction is that it is so self-interested in the mechanics of fiction that it is often hard to connect to the story and its characters emotionally. As I get older, I am finding that I really value an emotional connection to my reading. Yes, I am fascinated by books such as this, but they remain hard work and are often very difficult to connect with.
If this is your first exposure to meta-fiction of any kind, give this one a wide berth. Rather begin with David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas as a form of meta-fiction ‘lite’. Then again, if you are already a habitué of Mitchell, you will probably be fascinated to find out how far the form can be expanded and twisted in the hands of a dedicated writer like Park.
“I always warned students against complexity for its own sake, and to consider the virtues of the simple story, simply told.”
These two quotes sum up what I found both fascinating and frustrating about this short novel of three inter-linked meta-narratives by Paul Park. On the one hand, Park rather dazzlingly conveys not only the potential of the written word, but the plasticity of the novel format itself.
We are so habituated to traditional narrative formats that any form of meta-fiction (simply understood as a recursive story, where the beginning and ending are enfolded into a Möbius Strip of multiple beginnings and endings) often takes us out of our comfort zone as readers.
As soon as we have to ‘work’ at a text in order to extract its meaning, the compact between author and reader changes, I think, where the reader becomes a far more active (and culpable?) creator of that particular text and its embedded meaning.
It is not that simple though, for on the other hand, meta-fiction often engages multiple levels of irony and various sleight-of-hand tricks to frustrate the reader in his or her quest for meaning. I think the main aim of this is to force the reader into thinking differently about how the text itself functions as a discrete unit, and the (sometimes contradictory) roles that the author and reader play in this process.
I say ‘contradictory’, because the main bugbear with meta-fiction is this: any reader not habituated to this particular form is unlikely to find any kind of conventional narrative satisfaction or resolution here; and hence is unlikely to read such a book, which defeats the stated purpose of educating readers into reading differently and thinking about texts differently.
The other problem I have with meta-fiction is that it is so self-interested in the mechanics of fiction that it is often hard to connect to the story and its characters emotionally. As I get older, I am finding that I really value an emotional connection to my reading. Yes, I am fascinated by books such as this, but they remain hard work and are often very difficult to connect with.
If this is your first exposure to meta-fiction of any kind, give this one a wide berth. Rather begin with David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas as a form of meta-fiction ‘lite’. Then again, if you are already a habitué of Mitchell, you will probably be fascinated to find out how far the form can be expanded and twisted in the hands of a dedicated writer like Park.
An astonishing, brilliant, challenging meditation on memory, reality and imagination, the three engines that drive us or through which we drive, cobbling together our visions of ourselves and our families and the world. In the past a girl writes a story about a boy in the future, or is the boy in the future telling a story about a girl in the past? Their strange adventures intertwine like a moebius strip, one of the best technical achievements of such I've seen outside comics. An interview with an elderly engineer about a secret World War 2 project turns out to be the textual element of an art installation, written by a writing teacher and science fiction writer visiting home not long after the death of his mother, wrestling with the next step of putting his father in a nursing home and worrying about his severely autistic sister. Many years later the writer explores his family history dating back to the Civil War and earlier using documents left behind by ancestors on both sides, alluding to a strange nocturnal war with the dead.
So, not a conventional narrative, but a playful one that takes itself seriously and makes few concessions other than being up front about what it is doing and not doing. Books like these are frustrating as hell if you don't just let go of preconceptions and go with it. Park seems to be exploring the way he uses his personal life and his family history in his fiction, and the middle section in particular has some brutal, but also haunting, insights into writing not as a process but as a state of mind, almost. Memory and imagination twist reality in ways subtle and not-so-subtle. What can the reader trust and what can the writer? Not much, but you can certainly enjoy the results, and every now and then you can pick up a weapon and fight back against the armies of the dead from the past that are devouring the future.
So, not a conventional narrative, but a playful one that takes itself seriously and makes few concessions other than being up front about what it is doing and not doing. Books like these are frustrating as hell if you don't just let go of preconceptions and go with it. Park seems to be exploring the way he uses his personal life and his family history in his fiction, and the middle section in particular has some brutal, but also haunting, insights into writing not as a process but as a state of mind, almost. Memory and imagination twist reality in ways subtle and not-so-subtle. What can the reader trust and what can the writer? Not much, but you can certainly enjoy the results, and every now and then you can pick up a weapon and fight back against the armies of the dead from the past that are devouring the future.