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.
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.
Bold ... Endearing ... Dark-but-poignant ... In Seven Women, the full sum of the parts eluded me ... Spare, punchy dialogue ... An ode to imagination ... Heartrending ... While these stories all probe strange new frontiers, the ones that land most satisfyingly deliver an emotional payoff worthy of the collection’s thematic preoccupations ... With each wry, understated sentence, sparkling with [Park's] love of wordplay and studded with in-jokes and literary references, you feel your amusement meter fixed at a setting of 'low, rumbly lol,' with occasional spikes to 'lmao' ... Despite the sense of longing that hangs over these stories, Park remains curious about what we might gain in an age of digital reconstitution.
Always witty, sometimes surreal, frequently diving beneath mundane surfaces to mysterious and mesmerizing depths, An Oral History ofAtlantis...showcases a master of the form ... The real connecting thread here is...the startling and playful piquancy of his work ... Despite its range of characters and scenarios, the collection does have a definite voice and tone: conversational and erudite ... Park’s stories, by using style and substance to startle, can lean far to one affective angle and smoothly flex to another in the next line ... A dreamlike, darkly millenarian masterpiece of a plague-ridden New York … Haunting and human...it’s an astonishing close to an astonishing collection.
Extraordinary inventiveness ... Throughout his 16 stories, Park deftly upends quotidian expectations, encourages discomfort, and presents surreality with biting humor.
Park...writes books that are easy to love and hard to define. His writing is hilarious but also serious; chaotic while still cohesive; irreverent and earnest all at once ... Melds the unexpected with a healthy dose of humor.
...a series of 16 sneakily interconnected stories that turn everyday concerns resplendent thanks to creative plotting and elegant prose ... A couple of stories strain for effect and are cute rather than astonishing, but most of An Oral History of Atlantis is a treat. Fans of postmodern fiction will find plenty of fireworks to enjoy in this assured work.
Park’s delightful tales, which are driven by provocative ideas, strange occurrences, and gripping plots, pay tribute to the legacy of Kurt Vonnegut in the best ways. This pitch-perfect collection will linger in readers’ minds for a long time.
Not every story lands...but in most cases Park writes with an open-mindedness that suggests our every device can be mined for intelligent fiction. A collection that revels in its quirks, smart and sensitive in equal measure.
