AN ORAL HISTORY OF ATLANTIS: Stories, by Ed Park
Fifteen years after his comical debut novel, “Personal Days,” skewered white-collar work culture in the midst of the 2008 financial crisis, the writer and editor Ed Park published a second novel that reached beyond mundane office realities.
Inventive, dense and more than 500 pages long, “Same Bed Different Dreams” was a demanding literary collage of spy and metafiction devices, real and manufactured South Korean and Korean American history, and pop culture. It went on to become a 2024 Pulitzer Prize finalist and the winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for its energy, ambition and sly humor.
Now Park’s third book is out, a collection called “An Oral History of Atlantis” whose 16 stories are similarly unbound by run-of-the-mill realism. Like “Same Bed Different Dreams,” it is a pastiche of forms and nods to genre fiction, from commentaries on campy sci-fi movies to middle-aged dissections of long-gone relationships to indignant epistolary rebukes.
The tales often adopt a knowing, nerd-chic irony. Characters with names like Bethany Blanket and Vernon Bodily are rendered in prose full of writerly self-deprecation and mock hipsterdom:
In Portland my handler, Jonas, took me to lunch at a locavore haunt that featured seafood haggis and artisanal jelly beans.
Park’s flash fictions can be capsules of wit. In one, a man lists the antic behaviors of his medicated wife in a series of repeated assertions: “The wife on Ambien hacks into my Facebook account and leaves slurs on the pages of my enemies.” The introductory story, “A Note to My Translator,” is a critique by a disgruntled novelist of an arbitrary translation of one of his books. His lofty, antiquated diction and ego reminded me instantly of Charles Kinbote, the deranged scholar-narrator of Vladimir Nabokov’s “Pale Fire”:
You asked, in your letter, what sort of chess pieces I had in mind when I wrote this scene. … I cannot answer this question for you, E., since there are no chess sets (and hence no chess pieces) in the meticulously researched milieu of my novel — that milieu being the incredibly serious, hands-pressed-in-a-gesture-of-prayer inner world of a man who sits alone and dundrearied off the coast of Madagascar.
Occasionally a story or passage has a haunting, existential quality reminiscent of Italo Calvino or Kathryn Davis, as if we’re hovering over an amorphous landscape with signposts written in runes. The title story, for instance, is set in an alternate New York City where all the bridges connecting it to the mainland have been blown up to guard against a virus called Metaphor (MtPR). A lonely, erudite man obsessed with his diminutive stature follows a writer through wintery streets, then abandons the pursuit to enter, via pictures in an antique viewing booth, a world of whales.
Outside, the fictional New York is a lost kingdom, becoming detached from its real geography and turning fluid — an island whose identity, possibly, has already been subsumed into myth:
I was seasick, although not from fantasy. The bridges, it seemed, had acted like stays securing Manhattan, and now it was moving south to freedom, while its edges slipped into anonymity.
Compared with Park’s novels, the collection feels untethered — a natural condition for texts gathered across decades and bound in a single volume. Where novels are purpose-built structures shored up with vectors of plot and suspense, collections like this one offer an experience more akin to strolling through a writer’s mind over time.
What these stories have in common is their playful, arty milieu and a sense of encodedness. Language and culture are ciphers that can never be fully broken; the slippery elusiveness of their multiple meanings is meaning enough.
AN ORAL HISTORY OF ATLANTIS: Stories | By Ed Park | Random House | 201 pp. | $28
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