What is history?

What is history? So it is asked, repeatedly and pointedly, in Same Bed Different Dreams (no comma), by Ed Park, a readably maximalist metafictional alternate "history" of Korea positing that the Provisional Government established during Japan's occupation of Korea operates to this day, its ultimate aim being a unified Korea. Fact, perception, memory, imagination. Drawing connections and filling in the blanks.

Pop quiz (in the guise of mandatory corporate security training):

After Japan's defeat in World War II, Korea was divided into North and South across the 38th parallel

A. by someone in the U.S. State Department who had to find a map in National Geographic because he wasn't exactly sure where Korea was.

B. and the animosity between the Soviet-backed North and U.S.-backed South led to the Korean War — the "Forgotten War."

C. where no border existed before.

D. or was it?!

I read most of this book two-handedly, in one fist my ereader, in the other my phone, ready to check names and events against popularly recorded history (and I really messed up my algorithms in the process). The problem with reading alternate history is knowing enough actual history to be able to discern the deviations, and to be honest, what little knowledge I have about Korea is limited to K-pop and M*A*S*H

"It's said that the Korean Provisional Government is more a state of mind than an actual governing body." Park reveals foundational members, secret members, anticipatory members, and undercover operatives of the Korean Provisional Government (KPG), among them Isabella Bird, Leon Czolgosz (assassin of President McKinley), poet Yi Sang, Harold Sakata (who portrayed Bond villain Oddjob), Douglas MacArthur, Marilyn Monroe, Jesus Christ, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Ronald Reagan, Younghill Kang, Thomas Wolfe, Maxwell Perkins, Richard E. Kim, and Philip Roth.

The history of the KPG is presented in the form of a manuscript titled Same Bed, Different Dreams (with a translator's note about deleting the comma), read by writer Soon Sheen, whose day job, much like mine, mostly consists of navigating (sometimes literally) a techmegacorp, and trying to figure out what the hell their job actually consists of.

Park's Same Bed also asks (literally), "What is a book?" Concerning Syngman Rhee's The Spirit of Independence, one of the secret bibles of the KPG,

Few readers can remember where all the chapters are, which means the book is often encountered out of order. More important than the book's contents is the fact of its existence: that it has been composed in extremis, cut up, and concealed.

This novel is a celebration of fiction, intertextuality, and, in a roundabout way, good editing. "The problem with being a good copy editor is that the world will always be in error."

One main narrative thread concerns the sci-fi series 2333 (so named either to honour the fictional author's wife's birthdate, or to call out the legendary founding of Korea in 2333 bc; personally, I can't help but think of 2666; and apparently in Chinese it's the equivalent of lmao), pulp fiction space adventures written by a PKD-admiring Korean War vet, and serving as inspiration for a couple of game developers, with the resulting software folded into the algorithms of the aforementioned techmegacorp.

This novel bounces from the tragic (suspicious?) death of Kim Jong Il's little brother at the age of about 4 to the circumstances of the destruction in 1983 of Korean Air Lines Flight 007 by Soviet Air Forces.

Despite its concern with Korea, it's dense with Americana. It follows Betsy Palmer (who eventually starred in Friday the 13th, which has an imagined backstory rooted in the Korean War and its aimless violence can be seen as an allegory of American intervention; also one of Kim Jong Il's favourite movies). It trails Ronald Reagan (who ratted out communists and eventually became president). It documents their encounters on gameshow I've Got a Secret. It plays JFA on a loop (that's punk band Jodie Foster's Army, whose name was inspired by John Hinkley Jr, who attempted to assassinate Reagan).

(Palmer also dated James Dean, regarding whom we have this wonderful sentence: "Half of him is falling apart at the seams while the other half insists there are no seams.")

Also hockey lore. One short chapter division is named after my hometown, being where Tim Horton crashed and died (and I've been craving a cruller since reading those pages). Because of course Same Bed covers the history of the Buffalo Sabres, whose very existence is tied to the KPG, evidenced through their 1974 11th-round draft pick — "nonexistent" Taro Tsujimoto of the Tokyo Katanas (why are they called the "sabres" anyway?), and culminating in Park's dramatization of the fog game, featuring a bat swooping down from the arena rafters. Apparently, you can't make this stuff up.

I am inspired to see Friday the 13th, a film I didn't think I'd ever watch, even though Same Bed has given away the entire plot and ending. 

Yura insists that the film is as deep and beautiful and disquieting as anything he's seen. That it's a dream masquerading as the ultimate horror film. A poem of grief. 

It was early pages when I gave up on grasping the intricacies of occupational and international politics, and simply gave myself over to this wild ride, a distorted fun-house version of history laden with conspiracy. Park performs pure magic.

To do
Procure a copy of Dictee.
Watch Friday the 13th.

Vampires!

Importance of names —
Most appellations appear to displease them; they would prefer not to be discussed at all, I believe. The expression "un-dead" is often considered distasteful. (I use it privately here, but would never utter it aloud in the club.) "Revenant" will do at a pinch, though the connotations of burial and return are a little indelicate. I asked Verner what name he preferred. He said that I was considering the question from the wrong angle. "We don't need words for ourselves," he said. "It's the living we're always watching out for."

"What do you call us, then?" I asked.

He said that there were few names he would care to repeat — the kindest being "bleaters." "Blood bag" is another. A buxom human female, in low circles, might be termed a "claret jug." He added that amongst those with better manners, the most widespread term for us is "the Quick."

Then he smiled — an effort made solely to discompose me. "Not always quick enough, of course."

Lauren Owen's The Quick is a vampire novel. Why this should be a secret is beyond me. But I'm betting that:
1. If you've heard at all about The Quick through the usual internetted ways, then you already know there are vampires.
2. Readers of this blog would be more inclined to pick up this novel knowing it's actually a vampire novel, not just a romance steeped in Victorian gothic atmosphere.

(Quite frankly, while the jacket copy about secret societies intrigued me, it wasn't enough to get me to read this book. It's the vampires that grabbed me; I agreed to a review copy only after I'd heard about this twist.)

It's a hefty book, but action-packed and with interesting characters, so it's quick to read.

It's positively dripping with Victorian gothic atmosphere. It reminds me of Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange (though I can't recall the details of that book, the mood stays with me) and Diane Setterfield's Bellman & Black (which I loved for how it let the reader hover in uncertainty). The most obvious reference would of course be Bram Stoker's Dracula, but at the time of the events told in The Quick it was not yet written.

Owen's creatures fit nicely into the vampire tradition, building on fundamental notions we have, primarily via Dracula, but with a few qualities invented or borrowed from elsewhere. These vampires have not been reinvented into something unrecognizable; they are updated classic, and they are scary.

And as in Dracula, those affected by the creatures take up a scientific exploration of their nature, so fact and myths are affirmed and dispelled for the reader as they are learned by the characters. In both books we see the investigators turning to medical and technological innovations (even if to establish a scientific basis in folkloric remedies) to aid them in defeating, or curing, the monster. Certainly typewriters will record their accumulated knowledge for posterity.

Owen discussed some the themes in her novel in an interview with The Bookseller:

"In modern representations of the vampire, the vampire is a metaphor for sex and romantic relationships, but in earlier depictions of the vampire there is more leeway into folklore," Owen says. "There's the idea of the vampire coming back to his family and sickening them and the rest of the village with his attacks, so that was part of the choice.

"I think family relationships are very interesting; the idea of what you tell the people who are closest to you and what you don't tell them — or what you're able to tell them, and whether or not being able to tell them everything about yourself means that your love for your family is not complete."

The vampire as metaphor for sex is already firmly established in Dracula, and it's nice to see this fiction stretch a little further back into the lore. Owen explores a lot of different family relationships in this novel, which puts some store in the saying that blood is thicker than water. Vampires would live by that too.

My whole body impaled itself on a peculiar realization

Imagine a cheerful crowd of Leib Guard officers invading the imperial kitchens, holding the staff almost at gunpoint. Led, as ever, by Svetogorov, we descended into the basement, unlocked a door to a room, and flipped the lid of a chest to reveal layers of straw that covered perfectly preserved, huge slabs of ice. We whipped out our swords and attempted to hack at it, but the highest-grade imperial ice resisted splendidly. Then Svetogorov found an ice pic, and the next moment, shards of ice flew in all directions as if they were alive and trying to escape. My fellows frolicked after them, but I — I froze. One shard had lodged itself at my feet and lay there waiting. It glittered in the candlelight and it seemed to radiate confidence — a groomed, smooth, mature ice. It could have been old. As old as I. It could been the vary same ice from which Empress Anna's Ice Palace had been built. The ice my parents had lain on. Do they not say that ice has memory? Suddenly, it seemed as if my mind — no, my whole body impaled itself on a peculiar realization: if I picked it up, it would become one with me.

— from The Colors of Cold: A New Story from The Age of Ice, by J.M Sidorova.

Random yet far-ranging

Sylvie's knowledge, like Izzie's, was random yet far-ranging, "the sign that one has acquired one's learning from novels, rather than an education," according to Sylvie.

(I love that aphorism. Because it's my knowledge, too. And while I've had an education, it's clear that I hold novels in higher esteem.)

Would you, if you could, kill Hitler, before his rise to power, to prevent later atrocities? Several works of fiction have explored this moral quandary (though, there's not much quandary about it; most people absolutely would, and they don't think much of it); numerous time travel stories and alternate histories cover this territory.

Kate Atkinson in Life after Life takes a wholly original approach. Rather than engage in a temporal paradox or extrapolate the after effects of a dead Hitler, she explores potential past realities, one (or two) of which might've led to this event.

Ursula lives many, many lives, some more tragic than others. These are lives lived in parallel. It's kind of Groundhog Day but on a much grander scale. There is no awareness, no cumulative effect, no loop to be broken. It's just one relentless life after another. These are not successive lives, not reincarnations. Rather it is something closer to the concept of eternal return. Indeed in one life (or several, I guess), Ursula, still a child, discusses this with her psychiatrist and she learns from him amor fati.

My own worldview leads me to think of Ursula's experience in terms of a multiverse, with the universes so tightly stacked that one reality occasionally bleeds into others, giving Ursula that déjà vu feeling in many situations, although she knows that situation hasn't happened "before." On several occasions she experiences a kind of dread, like the shadow of another life passing through her.

It's a helluva conceit, but executed superbly.

Before you get the wrong idea, I should make it clear that Life after Life is about as science fictiony as The Time-Traveller's Wife. That is, not at all. This is drama. You may want to call it historical fiction, given that's it set in and around London over the first half of the twentieth century. The Blitz figures prominently.

Also, Hitler does not. It starts and more or less ends with him, but there's not much of him in-between. So forget Hitler. This is not a political intrigue. The whole point of him is to drive home the concept I've tried to explain above. That is, to convince you that the novel's premise is not trivial; every action has consequences, and they can be worldstage, as well as gut-wrenching.

So Ursula lives many lives, all of them at least slightly different, some vastly so. The first life we read is barely seconds long, if that. But one life sees her well into middle age. One assumes there are several more lives lived and untold here.

The bedroom was a terrible mess, clothes everywhere, satin petticoats, crêpe de Chine nightdresses, silk stockings, partnerless shoes lying abandoned on the carpet, a dusting of Coty power over everything. "You can try things on if you want," Izzie said carelessly. "Although you're rather small compared to me. Jolie et petite." Ursula declined, fearing enchantment. They were the kind of clothes that might turn you into someone else.

One life in particular had me reading far past my bedtime, and sobbing into my pillow. Ngah! All those lives, and she keeps dying.

If you've ever read Kate Atkinson you'll know she treads some morbid territory. Although death and disaster touch ordinary people, Atkinson has an extraordinary touch. Despite the violence of the world(s) Ursula lives in, this novel is gentle, and kind to her, and lovely. Fluid. It depicts sibling relationships in particular astutely. It also feels British, whatever that means — cool? stoic? — reminding me of A.S. Byatt's The Children's Book but less academic and more heartfelt. I came across only one Scottishism I had to look up ("thrawn"), in contrast to my one-dictionary-look-up-per-page average for other Atkinson novels.

This novel is pretty spectacular, and of all the novels I've read, this is one I'd recommend to my mother (a non-reader) (if I could talk her though/past the multiple lives concept), which is to say: inventive as it is structurally, the stories it tells are grounded and traditional and whole. Much as I'm a fan of Jackson Brodie (in books and on TV), I'd just as soon give him up if Atkinson would deliver another volume of Ursula's lives.

Hope in hopelessness

Maybe because I don't care for Mahler.

The Lost Prince, by Selden Edwards, has a romantic and time-travelly premise, but I never fully engaged with it. It is the sequel to The Little Book, which I haven't read and don't feel compelled to.

The Lost Prince starts in Boston, in 1898. Eleanor Putnam has returned from Vienna with lovely reminiscences and remarkable knowledge. She brings a manuscript she has written about Vienna's musical life; a jewel that will serve her in making her fortune; and a journal that outlines her future. Eleanor in essence leads a secret life, putting in motion events she knows must come to pass.

Spanning 20 years, the book is peopled by William James, Gustav Mahler, JP Morgan, Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung. Eleanor sings Mahler's praises, so early in the reading of this novel I was inspired to put some on. And I was reminded that I don't really care for Mahler. Too watery. Too florid.

The narration mostly has the tone of a biographical account. There is detachment, but also a sense that the narrator is judging characters in light of how the narrator knows the story to turn out. It's an interesting angle that mirrors how the characters are burdened with their own foreknowledge, but it's to the detriment of forming trust with and extracting sympathy from the reader.

A lot of information is divulged only as its required, as if the narrator suddenly remembered that it might be useful for the reader to know something even though it occurred 14 years previously and there's been no mention of it till now. And as often occurs in biographies, when the "story" shifts to cover another aspect or character, some information is repeated, either to remind the reader or to reconsider it in a new light.

The title was a bit of a mystery to me. It's about halfway through the novel that it becomes clear to whom the title is referring, and only near the end that the title is explained (and it's not relevant at all). I feel the story lacks focus and takes a long time to decide what it wants to be about.

A good chunk of the ssecond half of the novel covers the devastation of the first World War, in the form of letters from the front and later in Eleanor's search of the hospitals and wards that house the unfortunates, unknown and unclaimed.

"There is a great deal of hope within the hopelessness of your mission. There are thousands of unidentified and unaccounted-for soldiers in the aftermath of this horrible war. The odds are on your side."

This novel is about 200 pages too long. The war sections contribute little to the plot; while the repetition of the horrors might work to great literary effect when used by some writers, here it's at cross-purposes with the biographical tone, and so it managed only to bore me. The text is very repetitive, to the point that I felt no guilt in skimming for several pages at a time.

Yet. The Lost Prince has a great number of interesting threads to pull on. The exercise of free will in order to attain that which is predestined. How the present, and even the future, informs our past. Jung's collective unconscious, and how our dreams can inform our waking life.

I know little of William James, and what I know of Freud and Jung is mostly learned from popular culture. I'd be curious to know how well their ideas are represented by Edwards. I wish Edwards had spent more energy on these men and their ideas than on the eponymous subject.

Life is filled with plot holes!

So I did what I could, but the mimeographed pages always came back from the front office with unequivocal notes: too melodramatic, too absurd, too violent. They were forever complaining about plot holes. "Plot holes?" he'd shout. "Miserable accountant souls! Life is filled with plot holes! But he kept writing.

Kino, by Jürgen Fauth, is a highly entertaining novel. I read it in the space of a weekend. Neither the plot nor the characters are entirely believable, but there's something wonderfully over-the-top about them.

Mina and Sam have had to cut their honeymoon short because Sam has contracted dengue fever. While he's in the hospital, Mina returns home to find a package containing film reels of a movie long thought to have been lost, directed by her German grandfather. So Mina sets off on adventure taking her to Berlin and later to Hollywood.

Along the way she comes into posession of a journal her grandfather had written when his wife had him committed to psychiatric care in the 60s. Excerpts of Klaus's journal are interspersed throughout Mina's story. We learn about his upbringing, how he started making films, the glory he achieved, his life in Nazi Germany, how he made a new start in America.

The first feature-length movie Klaus "Kino" Koblitz ever saw was F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu. The experience was an eye-opening one, exuberantly described, and summed up like this:

This was the opposite of father's newsreels, this was the technology of the night, modernity pressed into the service of poetry, culling images from dreams and rendering them visible as if by the light of the moon, for all to see.

It was magic.

The entire novel is very filmic — transatlantic flights, mysterious men in suits, sex and drugs, chases across rooftops and at high speed in cars, Turkish baths, secret deals going down, gunplay.

Mapmakers always insert one wrong detail into their maps — a lake that doesn't exist, a county line that stretches a hilltop too far, a misspelled street name. It is a way to identify unauthorized copies, but it's also an opening through which the infinite rushes in: if one thing is wrong, then anything might be wrong. It's the same principle through which a single blank bullet calms the conscience of the entire firing squad.

Sometimes when I read reviews it feels as if the reviewers had access to a version completely different from the book I read. I've seen Kino described as a "novel of ideas," but in my view it is not that. That's not to say there aren't any interesting ideas there — there are plenty, not least the problem of reconstructing the past when written accounts and memory are unreliable, or drug-addled, or self-servingly selective. Whom do you trust? And what in life really matters? (Mina has essentially abandoned her husband for this quest, as others abandon reasonableness for art.) But it's all treated rather lightly.

While some of the journal bits put me in mind of Irmgard Keun's descriptions of living a bohemian and perhaps oblivious (or denying) lifestyle as the Nazi party rises to power, the overwhelming feel of this novel is nostalgia for the glory days of early 20th-century European film-making, of the kind I felt when experiencing The Invention of Hugo Cabret (both book and film). The modern-day goings-on, though I imagine they would translate well to the screen, feel slight and superficial by comparison. But despite a lack of depth perspective, the today portion of the novel is certainly energetic, even crazed.

As Klaus "Kino" Koblitz would say, "If it's not fun, why bother?" And this novel is undeniably very fun.



See also
Jürgen Fauth's website, with links to excerpts available around the web.
Tulpendiebe: a call for submissions for inclusion in an enhanced multimedia remix ebook edition of Kino.
A review at DBC Reads, which I think is pretty on the mark.
A smart Q&A with the author.

The taste of the Russian peasant

The thespian side of Elizabeth's soul! Hunger for the awe lighting up visitors' faces when they reached her presence, having passed through the enfilade of staterooms connected through carved and gilded portals. Hunger for the gasps of astonishment at the soft browns and yellows in the Amber Room. Shades of ebony touching on the color of dark honey, through which she, the queen bee, floated in her luscious dresses, her high heels sliding on the polished mosaics of the floors. "How vulgar, Varenka," Catherine had murmured. "She has the taste of the Russian peasant she will always be."

The Winter Palace, by Eva Stachniak, is a historical novel centering on the rise to power of Catherine the Great of Russia, from the time she arrived at the court of Empress Elizabeth, at the age of 15. Catherine is a mythic character, but the truth is I know very little about her.

Her story is told through the eyes of one of the maids at court, Varvara, the orphaned daughter of a bookbinder, whose main duties revolve around the transmission of information, or, more bluntly, spying.



I wanted to love this book, but didn't. A little over halfway through I toyed with the idea of abandoning it. After all, I know the story ends in a coup and Catherine's ascension to the throne. I think the only thing that pulled me along was the introduction of the character of Count Poniatowski and the connection to Polish history, though I think my curiosity would be better served by a biography or history text.

The tagline — "behind every great ruler lies a betrayal" — is a little misleading; there is no single betrayal on which events hinge.

It was not believable to me that Catherine would suddenly have so much support, at court, among the Guard, after having lived so much on the sidelines, out of the court's and public's eye. Her life was fuller, of course, than we are allowed to see (and the novel is weaker for us not seeing it).

That's one of Varvara's epiphanies, but she comes off as rather pathetic for not having realized earlier that her status was not unique, for not having questioned some sources of information or the nature of other relationships. For someone in the know, she knows very little. Similarly, I don't buy Varvara's grief for her husband, and the characterization of her relationship with her daughter feels forced. It's too bad that we experience all the novel's events through someone whose characterization is relatively weak.

There's a disconnect between her perception, Catherine's story, and what I think the reader is intended to come away with.

About the palace cats.

Excerpt.

Why should I long for things of this world?

My father's voice came back to me first: "The power of reason . . . breaking down fear and superstition . . . Kunstkamera is a temple of knowledge." And then I remembered our maids calling Peter's museum a cursed place, one that would bring bad luck on our heads. Were they right when they sneered at my father's words?

I pushed away these thoughts. I would not cry, I vowed.

The first thing Professor Stehlin pointed out to the Grand Duke in Kunstkamera was a glass dome covering a hill made of skulls and bones. Two baby skeletons propped on iron poles looked as if they were preparing to climb it. Beside them another skeleton, bow in hand, seemed about to start playing his violin. A wreathe made of dried arteries, kidneys, and hearts hung above them, with a a calligraphed inscription that said: Why should I long for things of this world?

"Anatomical art," Professor Stehlin called it. "So why should we think of death when we are still in our prime?" he asked his pupil.

The Grand Duke rubbed his hands and grinned. He remembered word for word what I had read to him days before.

To make us aware of the brevity of life. To remind us that we will have to account for our deeds well beyond the moment of death.

Professor Stehlin nodded with a smile.

— from The Winter Palace, by Eva Stachniak.

It feels right to be reading this when it's cold. These last weeks have been dark. There has been death, and also violence. It's been a sad time, and morbid too.

The description of this museum disturbed me. The book is historical fiction. At this point I had to investigate: how much is historical, how much is fiction?

Kunstkamera is real, situated across the Neva from the Winter Palace in Saint Petersburg. It is Peter the Great's personal collection of anthropological artefacts. Something of a freak show.

Much of the extensive and gruesome collection of anatomic specimens is viewable online.