This Novel Is So Bonkers, It Needs Three Narrators

SAME BED DIFFERENT DREAMS, by Ed Park. Read by Daniel K. Isaac, Dominic Hoffman and Shannon Tyo.

Intertwining the very real past of Korean colonization and American imperialism with speculative plots involving an underground government and a far-reaching parasitic tech company, Ed Park’s second novel, “Same Bed Different Dreams,” hits you over the head with the blunt force of its organizing quandary, again and again: “What is history?”

But thanks to the ingenuity of Park’s storytelling and the varied narrative prowess of the audiobook’s three narrators, Daniel K. Isaac, Dominic Hoffman and Shannon Tyo, the listener doesn’t mind the repetition. If anything, we need all the narrative signposts we can get in this vertiginous maze that winds through alternate histories, dreamlike impossibilities and books within books.

Park’s novel braids together three separate narratives that overlap in sometimes rewarding, sometimes confounding ways. Isaac reads “The Sins,” about a Korean American employee of a fictional technology conglomerate called GLOAT who becomes obsessed with an unfinished manuscript that mysteriously falls into his hands; Tyo reads the manuscript itself, a translated work of supposed nonfiction by Echo, the nom de plume of an elusive Korean writer who may or may not be alive/real/a restaurant deliveryman; Hoffman reads “2333,” a science fiction series by a Black Korean War veteran and former P.O.W. living in Buffalo. Characters, too, repeat throughout, tempting the listener to draw connections that prove so tenuous they vanish as quickly as they came.

That’s OK; the point isn’t to grasp every minute detail, pinning it to your mental bulletin board with thumbtacks and a network of strings. The fun in this audiobook comes not from solving the riddles of the past, but from the hallucinatory joy of witnessing real life collide headfirst into heartfelt and hilarious nonsense. As in art, so in life.

SAME BED DIFFERENT DREAMS | By Ed Park | Read by Daniel K. Isaac, Dominic Hoffman and Shannon Tyo | Random House Audio | 18 hours, 36 minutes

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