Ed Park, "Same Bed Different Dreams"

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Ed Park, "Same Bed Different Dreams" (2023)

 

     Ed Park   

     

N. Y. Times 서평

 

L. A. Times 서평

 

 

이 소설에 대한 일곱 작가의 '칭찬'이 책 겉표지 뒤쪽을 채운다. 그중 둘을 다시 읽어본다. 이 두 작가는 이 작품이 Pulitzer Prize Fiction 2024 finalist에 오른 것을 예견했을지도 모르겠다:  

 

"Your view of twentieth-century history will be enlarged and altered by Ed Park's mysterious panoramic novel. It seems to draw on Roberto Bolaño, Thomas Pynchon, and Helen DeWitt for its radical structure, yet remains grounded in a droll, sweet voice we've wished  to hear again since Personal Days. This is a Gravity's Rainbow for another war, an unfinished war." --- Jonathan Lethem, author of The Fortress of Solitude.

 

"Genius ... Same Bed Different Dreams is an extraordinary -- and hilarious -- genre-busting nesting doll of comedy, science fiction, and thriller and, at its core, an epic compendium of Korean history .... It's like no other novel I've read before -- a cabinet of wonders that demands to be read and reread." --- Cathy Park Hong, author of Minor Feelings.

 

특히 한인들은 한번 읽어볼 만한 소설이다. 이광수, 김소월, 이상, 서재필, 이승만, 박용만(1914년 네브라스카주에 Korean National Army Corps 창건), 안중근, 맥아더, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha 등에 관해 읽는 것만도 새삼스런 느낌을 준다. Younghill Kang 강용흘에 대해 읽게 된 건 내겐 뜻밖의 기쁨이었다. 그의 첫 소설  "The Grass Roof"는 한인이 쓴 최초의 영어 소설이다. 내가 갖고 있는 하드카버는 90년대 초에 덴버대 앞, 지금은 없어진, 헌책방에 처음이거나 두번 째로 들어갔을 때 발견한 거다.

 

아래는 본문에서

 

Younghill Kang escapes to America in 1921. Three years later, the United States bars entry to virtually all immigrants from Asia. A lover of English poetry, Kang gets his real American education while working a series of odd jobs in the Northeast and parts of Canada. He marries Frances Keely, a Wellesley-educated southerner, who temporarily loses her citizenship for marrying an Oriental.... He writes entries for the Encyclopaedia Britannica and teaches at New York University. There he befriends another instructor, the novelist Thomas Wolfe.... He introduces Kang to his editor at Scribner's, Max Perkins, who has worked with Fitzgerald and Hemingway.

 

Scribner's publishes The Grass Roof in 1931. Kang's novel begins with bucolic scenes of village life and ends with its young hero, Chungpa Han, witnessing the march 1 Movement of 1 1919, landing in jail, and later escping to America. Wolf praises the book, as do Rebecca West and her lover, H. G. Wells, who learned about Korea's plight years ago from a young Syngman Rhee. Kang starts a seconf novel, Death of an Exile, a continuation of Chungpa's story. It appers in 1937 as East Goes West, the year both the mad poet Yi Sang and the filmmaker Na Ungyu die of TB. (p. 340)

 

What is history? In May 1981(4313), novelist Philip Roth publishes Zuckerman Unbound. In one scene, a former TV "Quiz Kid" besieges the narrator with a calendrical list of facts. Two things, he says, happened in 1598: Shakespeare wrote Much Ado About Nothing, and the Korean admiral "Visunsin" developed ironclad warships to defeat the Japanese. Though Roth misspells Yi Sun-shin's name .... (p. 453)

 

Riding bikes with Ayn on the eve departing foe Everhard, he asks what JFA stands for.

 

"Jodi Foster's Army."

 

"I don't get it," Art says, just as a vision of Reagan tumbling  to the sidewalk gets in his head. (p. 490)