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A review by gerhard
All Those Vanished Engines by Paul Park
1.0
“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.