An Oral History of Atlantis: Stories
This book of comic sketches is lighter but no less exuberant ... These are comedies of embarrassment, but happily there is no embarrassment to the comedy, no leavening of the gags and witticisms with serious issues.
His own brand of Dada ... If there’s a pea (or more) of genius hidden amid the walnut shells he’s shuffling across the book, it’s on us to find it ... After the ornate sprawl of the novel, he revels in the shorter form, a palpable joy on the page. Irony has never had it so good ... What are we to make of Park’s fusion of comedy and danger, his puns and wordplay and arcane theories? He’s testing our patience for excellent reasons: We’re complicit in his fiction, perpetrators at the scene of a crime, the act of reading a jumble of synapses in our brains, spinning in all directions like a spray of bullets.
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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 ... 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 ... 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.
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