It’s a challenging read and yet wonderfully suspenseful, like watching a circus performer juggle a dozen torches; will one slip his agile hands? Park seeks to encompass the vast Korean diaspora, but he’s also fleeing realism, a personal diaspora, away from conventional forms ... Same Bed Different Dreams struts confidently across registers — lyrical, deadpan, acerbic, comedic — while doling out clues. Characters rotate in and out, some glimpsed in passing, their motives opaque ... Sprawling, stunning.
Park’s follow-up, Same Bed Different Dreams, arrives a full decade and a half later [after Personal Days], with all the heft, complexity and ambition such a lengthy interim suggests. The author has greatly expanded his literary scope and complicated his narrative technique, though certain fundamentals remain ... Braids three plots together in a bewilderingly layered structure ... Absurdly complex ... Although Same Bed Different Dreams is one of the most circuitously structured novels in recent memory, the reader is never confused about what’s happening in the practical sense. The path is always clear. It’s the connections between the disparate parts that make Same Bed Different Dreams succeed so powerfully yet enigmatically.
I can’t remember the last time I read a novel so thoroughly invested in coincidence — as a narrative feature, as a metaphysical puzzle, as the contrails left by history ... A supremely cool novel. Park commands an eye-popping array of cultural references ... The prose moves through the material like an Olympic diver slicing into the water, swift and splashless ... Am I a buzzkill for wishing this novel were more than cool? It can come across as too neat. Even the loose ends of plot — for example, a late-breaking twist about Soon’s wife — feel studiously nonchalant ... But absent some deeper conviction at its core, the novel can’t quite reach escape velocity; it ends up stuck in uneasy orbit around the theories he discards ... The range on display is exhilarating. And it makes you wonder: What would happen if he played for keeps?
The novel seems to take its stylistic inspiration from the 13th-century text Samguk Yusa, a chronicle of the Three Kingdoms of Korea, as well as from the postmodern virtuosity of writers such as Thomas Pynchon and Roberto Bolaño. The book’s scale is enormous; it contains multiple storylines that cross from the past to the present and a generous cast of characters. Most important, in this novel, is that history is alive: It is an overflowing conversation that never ends ... The relationship between Parker’s and Soon’s storylines is ambiguous, but fitting Park’s characters and events into a basic scaffolding of plot is beside the point. Parker’s role in the novel seems to be more symbolic; as a Korean War veteran and an American, he bridges the worlds of war and peace, Korea and America, and the past and present ... In Park’s world, the counterpoint to historical reality is yearning. In a scene from the third 'dream' document, a youthful Yi Sang has a last reunion with Gum, his former lover. She sings to him, 'Life is but a wandering dream or a dream of wandering.' The book wanders through the life and desires of various Korean characters, some famous, others forgotten or invented, who are, at heart, all seekers. In the end, the novel coalesces into an artful, painful dream—a fantasy of future unity.
What is the right adjective here? discursive? fascinating? bewitching? ... We’re looking at three narrative threads that interweave ... Really what we have here isn’t so much a novel about history as a novel about us—which is of course the same thing. Or is it.
...an imperfect moonshot of a novel. Centered around the last century of Korean history, this rangy work of speculative fiction displays a vibrant creativity that is extremely impressive and impressively extreme ... Countless times, Park had me marveling at some plot twist or bit of lexical wit, at a historical anecdote he unspools or pop-culture icon he evokes. And yet I never felt terribly invested in any of his dozens and dozens of characters ... Not every epic needs some grand unifying message or edge-of-your-seat tension — and, strictly in terms of entertainment value, Same Bed Different Dreams is an unqualified success. (Plus, you learn loads of history.) But in the end, I found myself admiring the creator more than the creation, appreciating Park's whimsy, erudition and daring more than this manifestation of his many talents.
An ingenious postmodern epic of colonial and postcolonial Korea framed in a satire of America’s publishing and tech industries ... This tribute to the fractured peninsula’s citizens, diaspora, and allies is one for the ages.
