Critics' Opinion:
Readers' rating:
Published Oct 2021
152 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
Search History oscillates between a wild cyberdog chase and lunch-date monologues as Eugene Lim deconstructs grieving and storytelling with uncanny juxtapositions and subversive satire.
Frank Exit is dead—or is he? While eavesdropping on two women discussing a dog-sitting gig over lunch, a bereft friend comes to a shocking realization: Frank has been reincarnated as a dog! This epiphany launches a series of adventures—interlaced with digressions about AI-generated fiction, virtual reality, Asian American identity in the arts, and lost parents—as an unlikely cast of accomplices and enemies pursues the mysterious canine. In elliptical, propulsive prose, Search History plumbs the depths of personal and collective consciousness, questioning what we consume, how we grieve, and the stories we tell ourselves.
"Montage is the message in the elliptical, swirly latest from Lim, who delivers a post-human manifesto on loss, identity, and the transfigurative potential of art...This brilliant sui generis takes storytelling to new heights." - Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Lim's ability to balance the fantastical with the heartfelt is what ultimately makes this book resonate. It does cover a lot of seemingly random ground, but as the full shape of the narrative takes hold, it becomes thoroughly compelling. Lim brings together the mundane and the extraordinary to powerful effect." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"'Pure art' is the theme, plot, and struggle of the haunted characters in Eugene Lim's novels. But book after book, pure art is what Eugene Lim makes. Every time I see a new Eugene Lim book on the shelves, I'm grateful. Looking for hope amid our capitalist doom, I read Search History with that exhilarating comfort I've felt in the best artists of their times, Petronius to Perec, Rabelais to Rizal—all of whom demonstrate a bracing commitment to challenging our ideological norms by testing without fear our art's forms. Surveying our planetary wreck on Eugene Lim's craft is to see our survival more clearly—through friendship's grief, through love's quest, through the bereaved trust that survivors must sustain in art." - Gina Apostol
"Search History, Eugene Lim's new masterpiece, is a novel of such richness, inventiveness, and strangeness that it rewards multiple readings. Lim has found a way to capture both the pointed specificity of the internet and its Borgesian infiniteness, in order to tell a picaresque tale about race and American culture, artificial intelligence, artmaking, storytelling, and so much more. Oh, and then this is also a novel about a dog! Search History is utterly original, from its opening pages to its final sentences." - John Keene
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in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Eugene Lim is the author of the novels Fog & Car (Ellipsis Press, 2008), The Strangers (Black Square Editions, 2013), and Dear Cyborgs (FSG Originals, 2017). His writings have appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, The Baffler, Dazed, Fence, Little Star, Granta, and elsewhere. He is a high school librarian, runs Ellipsis Press, and lives in Queens, NY, with Joanna and Felix.
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