Read This: All Those Vanished Engines

All Those Vanished Engines, Paul Park’s 2014 novel, is an elegant, intricate, wide-ranging work of metafiction built on the interaction of memory, truth, and imagination. An objective reality does not exist within it; instead, Park creates a looping alternate history using intertwined but unresolved stories of a family that has been part of this other world since its beginning.

The characters are writers and their muses, antagonists and scene-fillers, heroes, historians, and liars in their turn. Reality is only what they say it is–until it isn’t, any longer. Defined by their progenitors’ pasts, unable to control their own fate beneath that long shadow, the characters here struggle to be who they believe themselves to be rather than as they are constructed by others. 

All of them are unreliable narrators. It is a dizzying experience to read what they have to tell.

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Tied together by the familial thread, the novel’s three parts take place, with much overlap, at different points on this alternative timeline.

The first section of All Those Vanished Engines is a knotwork of politics, history, and framed narrative. Characters are inconstant, self-aware and demanding, and refuse to stay in any specific version of the story.

The second section delves into autofiction, referencing the historical details of the first but veering into personal musings, intimate details, and excerpts from another of Park’s works. 

The final section is set in a strange future where an aged academic connects as many dots of his family’s work as he can and rejoins the military and religious battles that never really ended.

Somehow, the disparate parts knit together into an emotional whole.

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All Those Vanished Engines is elegiac, always looking backwards, trying to make sense of what the dead once wanted. There is no straight accounting here, only versions and impressions and memories. Stories overlay each other. Characters move across scene and setting, from one version of their reality to another. They carry with them a self-aware nostalgia and a longing for a neat narrative with all mysteries solved and all loose ends neatly tied up. But time and place become slippery around them, unstable and mutable. Much as it is for us all.

It is a beautiful novel.

I highly recommend you seek it out.