Title: Same Bed Different Dreams (Goodreads)
Author: Ed Park
Published: Random House, 2023
Pages: 544
Genres: Literary Fiction, Speculative Fiction
My Copy: Paperback
Buy: Amazon, Kindle (or visit your local Indie bookstore)
There is a blurb on the front of the novel Same Bed Different Dreams by Ed Park that compares it with Gravity’s Rainbow. I have not read Gravity’s Rainbow yet, but I do assume this was more of a marketing gimmick. The blurb is by Jonathan Lethem, so it was enough to pique my interest. Not that I need the blurb, I have been eyeing this novel for more than a year, and I finally picked it up.
Trying to describe this novel is going to be difficult. It is a post-modernist, satirical metafictional novel…or maybe I should say two different novels: or maybe it is three different stories. The novel follows Soon Sheen, a former author, now working for a Google-like tech company known as GLOAT in the sections known as The Sins. At a literary dinner with fellow Korean Americans, Sheen hears about the next buzz book Same Bed Different Dream from an author known as Echo. He eventually gets his hands on some of this book and begins to read it.
This manuscript is told in a sequence of dreams and is an alternative history of the Korean Provisional Government (KPG) but then you have the 2333 story of a Korean War veteran writing a science fiction novel. So, it’s a book within a book; but that book is part alternative history and part specialities history. It sounds confusing, but I found this novel to be so much fun to read. Basically, it is a look into the divide of Korea, while both the North and South are considered as part of Korea, but they have different ideas on how the country should be run. They are living in the same bed but have different dreams.
While this novel explores the history of Korea, it also explores the idea of history and how it all falls to who is writing that history. For example, there are references of M*A*S*H in this novel, a TV show based around a movie, both telling a story of the Korean War, which is a subtext for the Vietnam War. I was surprised to learn the movie is about the Vietnam War, I had to look it up and it was made during that war. This book has so many layers and I keep trying to piece together the novel and keep coming up with more and more interesting ideas at play here.
As this is a satirical novel, there is a lot of comedy here, exploring not only the history of Korea, mainly around America and the Soviet Union’s influences on the country, but also the racism Korean American’s face (the reference to M*A*S*H set in the Korean War but being about the Vietnam War being one of those reference to the racism). There is even a scene in the book where a Korean is mistaken for a fake Japanese baseball player. The layers of this novel is what really stood out to me.
I enjoyed this novel so much, I wanted to reread it right away. I did borrow this from the library, but have since ordered my own copy, as I know this will be a book I will revisit. This reminds me of novels like Slaughterhouse Five, Catch-22 or Infinite Jest, but the novel I closely associated this book with is Underworld by Don DeLillo. My head is spinning, even trying to explain this novel; I love when I book has this effect on me. Not for everyone, but I am very much a big fan of Same Bed Different Dreams by Ed Park.
wow, sounds great! thanks, I had not heard of it