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nigellicus's review
5.0
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.
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