“Across Eugene Lim’s body of work—the four novels Fog and Car, The Strangers, Dear Cyborgs, and Search History; chapbooks, short stories, and other published prose—runs ‘a series of monologues,’ a ruthless and economical parataxis of figures and forms. The sections and subsections appear random, but they’re also dense, abstract, figurative, reiterating…”
“No one is writing like Lim. If anything, Lim forces us to articulate how we ask questions of the world—inside and outside literature. How does anyone act in retaliation or defense? How does anyone appraise and evaluate anything at all? How does one live inside this impasse?”
“[I]t would take no more than to watch the news or check the weather to understand the scope of our ongoing losses. Lim’s goal is more ambitious: not to be a cataloguer but to ask what genre of grief could ever serve as an adequate response.” —Sohum Pal in Full Stop
“This is the sort of book that proves that the novel will never truly die, as long as there are writers like Lim venturing into new narrative territory.” —Michael J. Seidlinger in The Lineup
“The most pleasant of Search History’s many surprises is the fact that it’s really a story about grief, and is poignant and cogent in extolling this pain. The artifice of genre is everywhere, but it never stops the characters from working through their feelings.” —Nolan Kelly in Hyperallergic
the beauty of its pacing; they wait, we wait. the spiritual and subtle use of entheogens and psilocybin. most of all an intimacy and grudging acceptance of the body, aging, sickness, and death. a current xenophobia transformed into a view of nationalities and states as various, perhaps natural, oppressions. the pop of a perfect or gross or grossly perfect or perfectly gross sentence, nonchalantly written. the hard-won insights into existence, the continuation/conclusion of a steady and sublime lifework. A great book! Thank you, David Ohle!
“[S]ometimes new works arrive, such as Eugene Lim’s strange, sinuous, highly memorable novel “Search History” that seem to herald some dawning technological epoch… [A] work of eerie and lasting power.”
“The construction of self and identity and the transformative nature of art underpin a work that, despite being clothed in clever satire and searing humour, is a tender exploration of how we love and what we consequently risk losing, of death and its aftermath, grief.”
The Chicago Review of Books calls Search History “An Ode to Joy in Autotune,“ and says, “This novel is very funny… Search History is a living, breathing novel. Its fascinations and enthusiasms are important yet ambivalent… mature, without being self-serious or fatalistic.”
[T]hese stories have shattered preconceived notions about novels and recast the bits into fresh forms…This bricolage surprisingly coheres by the novel’s end into an authentic expression of a mind striving to comprehend the inexplicable cruelties of the universe and humanity’s most proper response… Fans of Haruki Murakami’s melancholy, oneiric tales will also delight in Lim’s assault upon consensus reality. He encourages the reader to “stop making sense,” in the Talking Heads manner, and experience the universe as a magical tapestry of events whose overall pattern is perceivable only by God — or maybe after one’s own death.
i was very happy to receive this review in the Washington Post by Paul Di Filippo. it was a very gratifying review for me as it explicitly states some of my conceptual hopes and furthermore laid them out in a personal, insightful, and elegant style. at times it felt like a duet, so seen and well represented i felt. a sincere thanks to Paul Di Filippo.
[as an aside, the review does make a small and unimportant error by misnaming one of the characters as Muriel. (it’s truly not an important detail for a reader’s experience — but why it isn’t important is kinda important. (characters are a technology that evaporate within a greater and wider sense of personhood, might be brief summary of the/my argument.) but, to the reviewer’s credit, having an unnamed narrator is always confusing (and this one might have more than one). but, to clarify: the unnamed character that goes on the global hunt with Donna Winters for the AI/dog (in my non-authoritative authorial mind) is not Muriel.]
To place the storytelling act at the center of a novel is a risky strategy: the stories must fascinate. Lim’s stories do (except those few that he deliberately effaces as if to give a graphic representation of self-erasure). They have the exoticism, emotional authenticity, and intellectual depth to ensure that the reader will be enthralled. Lim’s knowledge of economic theory, political science, art history and practice, the minutiae and mechanisms of businesses large and small is sweeping. His verbal constructions exhibit lyrical and playful strains, indignation and sensuality, and a genuinely hip, idiomatic flair. Lim’s ambition to relate “grand narratives”—to tessellate them within a mysterious, comprehensive verbal construction and, in so doing, to recreate in his fictional universe the entire world and its archetypical figures—makes his novel an uncommon artifact. The Strangers in its complex self-referential, multi-layered structure, anecdotal mass, and restless inventiveness demands and rewards more than one reading.
