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In his 1961 book, What Is History?, the British historian E. H. Carr sought to answer that very question. Carr argued that history is a perpetual dialogue between the past and the present, that it is never neutral or objective. Ed Park has a slightly more idiosyncratic way of putting it in his new novel, Same Bed Different Dreams, but he essentially lands in the same place. One character, a Korean writer working under the pen name Echo, offers that history is “a) a vital lesson b) amusement for the idle c) the sum of symbols d) a record of pain.” It is a slippery, elusive story that largely depends on one’s point of view.

Same Bed Different Dreams is something of an alternative account of 20th-century Korea. It does not proceed chronologically, nor does it tell a coherent, single narrative. Instead, Park relies on ghostly manuscripts, letters, interviews, historical documents, anecdotes, and a collage of fact and fiction. 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.

[Read: A redacted past slowly emerges]

The novel’s plot is as complex as its structure and playfully resists pat summary. One of its main characters is Soon Sheen, a former writer who now works for an enormous tech conglomerate called GLOAT. He accidentally ends up with a copy of an unpublished manuscript by Echo, called Same Bed, Different Dreams (the difference between Park’s and Echo’s titles being only the addition of a comma), a mostly nonfiction historical record that depicts the Korean Provisional Government (KPG), a real-life organization that was founded in 1919 to fight for Korean independence from Japan. But in Park’s world, unlike in reality, the KPG never disbanded and is still operating clandestinely.

The reader follows Soon as he reads and reflects on Echo’s manuscript, which is made up of five “dream” documents. Each dream is organized into short numbered paragraphs and reads as a rough historical study of a different period of Korean history, including the KPG’s independence movement, the Korean War and the armistice that kept the Korean peninsula divided at the 38th parallel, and a string of subsequent dictatorships. As Soon reads each document, it becomes evident that the ultimate “dream” charted in Echo’s manuscript is the reunification of North and South Korea (this is the project that the present-day imagined KPG is said to be working on). Though the desire the book seeks to illustrate—for a unified, whole country—is simple, the pathways presented for getting there twist and turn in a frustratingly infinite number of ways. Characters enter and leave, real-life historical figures show up unexpectedly, and facts are presented askew. A common goal doesn’t necessarily mean a shared understanding of the past.

Woven among these chapters is another main narrative thread: that of a character named Parker Jotter. Parker is a Black American soldier who fought in the Korean War and was imprisoned in the North before coming back to the U.S. His return to civilian life in Buffalo is uneasy, and in order to survive, he creates a fantasy world in the form of a space opera. The series of science-fiction novels he writes is called 2333, and it follows the dreams of a soldier who wishes to explore the edge of the universe. 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.

The novel’s many characters—whom the reader meets in Russia, China, America, and the Koreas—seem intended to represent all of the Korean diaspora, or to otherwise have some connection to Korean history. Parker’s American wife, Flora, leaves him and later weds a Korean wig mogul in a mass wedding organized by the Unification Church, Sun Myung Moon’s infamous cult. Parker and Flora’s daughter Tina might be decoding mysterious, potentially North Korean propaganda for a man who claims to be Swiss but who turns out to be Korean. Woodrow Wilson ignores the pleas of Syngman Rhee, the first president of the future Republic of Korea, for the country’s official recognition as an independent nation. Marilyn Monroe performs for American soldiers posted in Korea during the war, and real-life artists, including the early-20th-century Korean poet Yi Sang and the late-20th-century Korean American artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, play small, essential roles in the narrative, creating a vivid palimpsest of the country’s past and present.

Pulsing beneath all of this is that hope of reunification, kept alive through the optimism and nostalgia of characters who are primarily scattered throughout the Korean American diaspora. At one point, a fictionalized version of Korea’s last true monarch, King Kojong, utters the words “Same bed, different dreams”—a Korean proverb that suggests that you can never really know someone, no matter how close you are. In this case, however, Park is referring to the potential designs that Japan and its other neighbors might have to control and occupy Korea. As King Kojong puts it: Korea is “a small bed into which bigger countries were trying to fit.” The few native Koreans present in the novel, and the more dominant characters of the Korean diaspora, continually resist those larger forces.

[Read: Person of Korea]

Today, the possibility of reunification feels more distant as North Korea continues to build its military arsenal and threaten its southern neighbor. Many young people in the South see reunification and the requisite enormous financial investment into the poverty-stricken North as a potential tax burden, at most, and many other citizens have given up entirely. Outside of a small, committed group of activists within Korea, the novel suggests that it is the exiles and the expatriates that keep the dream alive.

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.

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