Search History

by Eugene Lim

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.

Genres: Fiction, Science Fiction, Novels, Contemporary, Grief, Artificial Intelligence, Metafiction

191 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 2021

About the author

Eugene Lim is the author of the novels Fog & Car (Ellipsis Press, 2008; Coffee House Press 2024), The Strangers (Black Square Editions, 2013; Coffee House Press 2026), Dear Cyborgs (FSG Originals, 2017), and Search History (Coffee House Press, 2021). His writings have appeared in The New Yorker, The Believer, The Baffler, Granta, Dazed, Little Star, The Denver Quarterly, The Brooklyn Rail, Your Impossible Voice, Vestiges and elsewhere. He is the librarian at Hunter College High School, runs Ellipsis Press, and lives in Jackson Heights, NY.

Reviews

[Eugene · Rating 5 out of 5]

Goo dreads.
"Go O!" Dre ads.
Go : O, dreads.

[juch · Rating 5 out of 5]

earlier i tweeted, eugene lim's books remind me of millennium actress by satoshi kon they are beautiful :,)

also simon was talking about trying to read the year of magical thinking by joan didion (rip) but stopping bc "grief of that scale currently inaccessible to me thankfully"

idk just stray thoughts bc like w dear cyborgs i find this book so hard to review bc it's unlike anything i've ever read before in how it contains so much, ie it is amazing!!!

before i get into content just amazed at author's daringness to write w such breadth, play w self awareness of book form (fun to look into what a shaggy dog story rly is, also i just played doki doki literature club which was another transcendent exp w art involving self awareness of form), repeat tropes from dear cyborgs in way that was somehow satisfying rather than tired. like at end, there was that "here we go again!" feeling from kids' shows that was very homey. weird analogy. point is the journey/search repeats, for nothing, for everything. this was where millennium actress came in both formally (self awareness of form) + thematically for me

and i loved all of the formal techniques. besides the shaggy dog stories, the autobiographical interludes, incorporation of historical ppl like pat morita (loved the youtube link), the dialogues, and the final one where ppl talk past each other, the in-book purpose of which was set up earlier, for an ai to learn from the spontaneity of, in order to incorporate into the award-winning book it writes

lim is really good at not hammering in these connections or the identities of certain characters to the point where i'm not sure i have everything down, which is a really great feeling to have. i both feel like i could reread/replay this book like unlocking easter eggs in a video game and like i'm not supposed to (which is kinda true for video games too, it's lame to check off easter eggs like a list)

besides main theme/storyline of loss of friend (a grief that was kinda inaccessible to me, thankfully, but that i also rly resonated w by the end), i rly appreciated theme of artists grappling w institutionalization. there was this big plot driving question of whether dysthymic ai scientist/doctor y could really build an ai that could write an award winning book, and you were rooting for her, initially as a "fuck you" to awards but in the end idk why i also felt like she should be able to do it bc why not, all art, human and nonhuman, is random and fleeting anyway haha. i liked the conversation about all white poetry rooms, how it ends with ambiguity—"i am not entirely sure if the one pure option, that of opting out, is preferable to the messier and more compromised choices of, variously, staying in." w that not really being a choice anyway? "shit happens," also that story of the older artist friend helen, her creativity being unleashed by her commercial failure. the book feels realistic about the longing for institutional success, but ultimately moves on to i guess, just dealing w life

i guess on a meta level, this book is probably not gonna do super super well, and i'm happy about that in a selfish way haha

frank exit does very purely opt out, in a haunting way, private self immolation... the narrator chasing his spirit bc as another asian american, he represented a way to live, also felt like chasing his tragic, not-for-this-world artistic purity. the diff characters feeling distinct was def an improvement on smth i had critiqued about dear cyborgs

god this is really one of my messiest reviews. cool! also bc of this book i started listening to sorabji, so good

[Nate D · Rating 4 out of 5]

Miyoko Ito, Tabi Sox or Foot Fetish, 1974

The information jumble of our lives, granted salience -- even against the obviously trite, or recycled, or ridiculous -- by the human forces beneath: personal identity, and interpersonal connection, and the emotional centers that bind them. A cybernetic shaggy dog for a particular present.

[Bill Hsu · Rating 3 out of 5]

I loved The Strangers and Dear Cyborgs, but it took me awhile to warm up to Lim's new novel. My memory may be totally failing me here, but Search History seems more fragmented than the earlier books, and more densely packed with metafictional elements and intertextual references. As in the earlier books, I really enjoyed the clarity of the writing, and the nuanced and thoughtful treatment of ideas. Search History is concerned with the complexities of families and self, the death of loved ones and the processing of death, and the intrusion of artificial intelligence into our lives. It is grounded in messy, specific stories that are absurd, inventive set pieces. I think what the author is trying to do in the closing sections is very tricky, and I am not sure it was entirely satisfying to me. But definitely a rollicking, fascinating ride, once I got warmed up. And of course I loved the modern composer name checking (Sorabji! Unsuk Chin! Tristan Murail!)

[3.5 stars, rounded down perhaps a little harshly.]

[Kion You · Rating 5 out of 5]

Had fun with this book - Lim is one of the few, if not the only, Asian American novelist who has been churning out 'novels of ideas' for the past decade or so. Book feels like a sharp assemblage of dialogic moments on the usefulness of racial representation discourse, Asian avant garde art, NY cosmopolitanism, meta-narratives around the relationship between AI and the novel, interplays with genre tropes (crime thriller, noir, space western, etc) - like his previous books, I'm not sure if these things really cohere into anything emotionally lasting, but I'm not sure that's quite the point either.

What separates this one from his previous books is the focus on grief - in the beginning there's a bit too much intellectualizing of the stereotypes that grief writing must hold, but eventually I grew to be moved by some of the depictions of grief, especially with the characters' inability to vocalize it, their unease with appropriating the grief of others, essentially when the book finally bared down on the inner lives of characters rather than escaping into abstraction.

Lots of laugh out loud moments (characters calling each other out on their stupid takes), but maybe because of the insider baseball being played with other people who are similarly tired of a bland Asian American discourse.

[Areeb Ahmad (Bankrupt_Bookworm) · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Because after long enough you forget what you wanted, what you were going for, so that the search becomes where you live, its history your universe. Even if you bet your entire life on this MacGuffin. Especially if you did. Only when you do, in fact. The history's habit, landmarks, and tone what make you. So, dog, I'll throw the stick and you chase it. Yes Master. Okay dog."

Perhaps it is just a reckless comparison on my part—especially since I have read just one book by both—but in many ways, Eugene Lim seems like America's answer to Isabel Waidner. Wild is too tame a word for Search History. At its core, it is a novel about grief and loss, about dealing with death and recuperating from its effects. It is an incredibly prescient novel, particularly with ChatGPT's rapid notoriety and the recent rise of AI art, and it will only grow to be more relevant. The mechanistic shrouds the frightfully human.

Whether it be the AI-dog chase chapters, the heartfelt autobiographical(?) sections, or even the chapters of conversations with friends, Lim imbues his writing with surplus life, "a chunk of reality". The prose sparkles and adapts itself to the different parts. Frequently tongue-in-cheek, and continuously deeply referential, it opens to profound emotional depth regarding the pain of others (and oneself) where articulation decays. Lim contributes to the discourse on race, the place of art in our lives, issues of identity, and storytelling.



(I received a finished copy from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.)

[Zander Kim · Rating 5 out of 5]

F*ck this is good. This is a book I would want to write.

[Sara · Rating 5 out of 5]

Inarticulate flailing and sputtering. If I hadn’t loved Dear Cyborgs, I might have read the blurb and fled like Frank the dog. So glad I didn’t.

[E.Y. Zhao · Rating 5 out of 5]

Why are critics still debating internet fiction? Eugene Lim took the belt here. Stop writing internet fiction, Zoomers, it’s over!

(This book communicated the deep beauty and melancholy of all our past & future lives)

[kathleen · Rating 5 out of 5]

sublime

[Huijia Yu · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not sure if I loved it because it’s the kind of thing that I love or because it was genuinely amazing. Either way- very thoughtful and very current and kind of all over the place (in a good way).

[Webb · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pretty rare to read something and really feel like it's a new writing style. Pretty fun too.

Really great structure and narrative devices. In a satisfying way, the dialogues and abrupt scene changes are clearly used to accomplish specific things by the author - to raise new context, to introduce alternate experiences or alternate opinions. Nothing in the book feels experimental for the sake of being experimental or for the sake of being different or trying something new. It feels very intentional in a great way

[AL · Rating 5 out of 5]

I came across this book by internet-chance. Maybe the algorithm, like some dogs, knew what I wanted. This is the first novel I have read by Lim and it will not be the last. The story-telling paired alongside blunt observations is a beautiful diptych of ideas, unanswerable questions, and human intelligence. Ultimately, Lim has a brilliant way of playing with language, time, and circumstance. This is a book you can both consume and gather great wisdom from, especially in regards to how a writer can boldly map out their own mission to write a work of fiction and defy (rather heroically) the ghosts of tired, linear fictions past. I think I am most impressed with how Lim weaves every angle of this book, utilizing multiple perspectives and histories, into one exhilarating and concise breath. This work is, in a word, solid. And has brightened and woken up my relationship to fiction like few novels have. We need more writers, like Lim, redefining what fiction can do, how it can announce itself without hesitation. How it can experimentally map out (in forward and reverse) a journey peppered with unfiltered truth-seeking and, above all, Lim's consistent confidence in the task and boldly fluid methodology at hand. Read it.

[Jessica Dai · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ok so like where the hell did he find the word dysthymic? As in, the dysthymic AI scientist who wants to basically GPT-X an award-winning novel, which is what Search History reads like sometimes, but also a robot dog which possibly is a sort of reincarnation of the narrator’s dead friend, a few characters whose names sound familiar from Dear Cyborgs, Lim’s last novel. Plot, structure, dialogue, none of it makes any sense, and/but also it sort of works. I didn’t really know what was going on but I still felt things, like yeah maybe we are just chasing things that maybe we don’t even believe in and like yeah maybe we are just walking around doing shitty imitations of one another but also what distinguishes us from GPT-X is that we still care, about all of this, about each other.

Then, in the last few phrases of the piece, Frank slows down the number, freezes all of our lives for a moment, suddenly but smoothly transforming the song with a series of Satie-inflected chords, and it’s as if we were allowed for just a few seconds to look into the basin of the music to see there what we always knew we’d find: a profound and utter void.

[Aric Harrison · Rating 5 out of 5]

Can’t recommend this book enough, I am really floored by what Lim is able to pull off in this text. Im going to try put words down as a review but God damn this book is so prescient and fantastic I don’t think I’ll do a good job at really conveying what I’m feeling.

I mean what does it really mean to read the internet like a novel? How does the internet read our dreams and stories? What can an ai read from our histories and stories ?

In Eugene Lim’s Search History, these ideas are reflected in the way the book’s form mimics the structure of online browsing: stories branch, double back, link to tangents, and interwoven characters, genres, and voices much like tabs and search results on the web.

Instead of seeking a linear, singular plot, reading this way means following associative threads. Lim allows conversations to overlap, ideas, and references lead in unexpected directions, just as one might jump from link to link on the internet. The sum is not chaos but an emergent, surprising whole: insights found in the meandering connections between disparate topics and voices, and meaning discovered in the interplay of accidents, interruptions, and recurrent themes.

Everyone who is interested in A.I must read this and also Lance Olsen’s Skin elegies. Double feature them like a drive in movie if you can!

[Reid · Rating 4 out of 5]

a book that an AI could never write (positive)

[Mina · Rating 3 out of 5]

Really wanted to love this one, but fell flat at the end for me 😦

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved huge parts of this book, especially its reflections on grief. But somehow it didn't hold together for me completely - which I think its disjointedness was somewhat by design. It was a bit too out there for me overall but I enjoyed stretching myself by reading it.

[S P · Rating 3 out of 5]

'But that white poetry room—or more exactly said: the room of art servicing the hegemony—is still one on occasion I can't help but find myself in. And furthermore I don't wish to be ashamed of it, will simultaneously campaign for a diverse and more representative future, but I am not entirely sure if the one pure option, that of opting out, is preferable to the messier and more compromised choices of, variously, staying in.

Maybe you're just weak. Or selfish.'

(from 'Inauthentic Sushi', p107)

[alexggrandma · Rating 5 out of 5]

brilliant in no small way

this is the best ideas-novel ive read and like any great idea based art it still thrills&makes you wanna cry

all about grief grief grief art & AI thru eugene’s insane surreal collage-structure go read this right now holy shit it all ties together perfectly, succinct little stomach drop

[Lisa · Rating 5 out of 5]

fun, fragmented, fintrospective

[meeners · Rating 5 out of 5]

this is a book that has passages like the following:

But now. Now, it's no longer the vexing question, the day-to-day problem. Now, it's just a question of the loss. The losing and the loss. Now it's trying not to die so much every day, to not have the dying happen around me so much, to not see the dying even in that which is coming to life, to not be crushed every moment by the loss the loss the loss.

alongside passages like this one:

"You're not taking the dog."
"I'm much stronger than you."
"I'm much smarter than you."
"This isn't a playground fight."
"Shut it, poophead."
"You shut it."

i laughed. i also cried, at parts. this is a weird, weird book that folds into itself and then fractures and reforms like a surrealist kaleidoscope - but always with a purpose, and with utter sincerity (if also some self-deprecation). at its core it is a story about grief, and about survival. as with dear cyborgs, the ending is breathtakingly perfect. but in the end (ha) it's never about endings, is it? to borrow from that other book, we mourn and are chased and chase and fight and mourn and mourn and mourn and mourn.

[Mel · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is more of a 3.5 🌟. I think if I read it a second time it would bump up to 4 stars because even though this book is on the shorter side I feel like there is a lot to digest. It took some time to get used to the style of writing and how each part of the book was broken up into. How the characters deal with grief and come to the conclusion is interesting. I’d say the story is kinda bizarre. It did take me a bit more time to finish the book but I think once I read it a second time I’ll enjoy it even more. Hoping I can reread this at the end of the year and see what I discover.

[Eve · Rating 3 out of 5]

A quote deep learning AI wrote this review

This book was a whirlwind of genre-bending, surreal and referential and at times soul flaying writing. Some of it didn’t do much for me, but I was also able to relate deeply to some of the characters and their struggles of grief, abandonment, generational trauma - particularly Donna who I see a lot of myself in when it comes to feeling as though there must have been something wrong with you that made you unworthy of a parents love. What particularly stuck with me was the search for understanding and for healing those (including myself) personally affected by suicide experience, and the deep desire to be able to talk to the dead and knowing that that person is well and truly gone. Or are they..

[Amy Qin · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read it in a really staggered way over the course of three weeks which maybe is only possible with a novel like this. Might need to re read but there’s some cool ruminations on art, AI, humanity and life, which is drifting

[Sam Ernst · Rating 4 out of 5]

At first, I thought this was going to be one of those novels where the author simply uses their characters as mouthpieces to espouse their own personal philosophies--all shoehorned and unnatural. But then, a few chapters in, it found its pace and became a mesmerizing meditation on grief and loss.

[Eduardo · Rating 3 out of 5]

Unlike anything I've ever read. I probably should have paid more attention to it--and on a future reread I will--but considering the way I read it, the way I tend to read books, it was quite difficult for me to follow what was happening. I wasn't sure what was actually going on in the pages, if I had totally misread a paragraph or an event, and what my mind had come up with to try to make some sense of it all. I applaud the author for managing to create something so out there, something that's just different, deliberately different, and that's trying to say something, even if I didn't quite catch everything it was trying to say.

[Julie Capell · Rating 5 out of 5]

So, so, so much is stuffed into this amazing novel I hardly know how to write a review. I think I'll just drop some of my musings here in no particular order. (Is this my attempt to mimic the experimental, non-linear form of the novel? No, because it would be impossible for me to come close to capturing its seemingly loose structure which is, upon closer examination, completely controlled, purposeful, and brilliant).

I'm going to skip over all the stuff about grief (as many have noted, grief features large in the novel) and start with the chapters that are all named "shaggy dog." [a quick internet search reveals that "Shaggy dog stories play upon the audience's preconceptions of joke-telling. The audience listens to the story with certain expectations, which are either simply not met or met in some entirely unexpected manner. A lengthy shaggy dog story derives its humour from the fact that the joke-teller held the attention of the listeners for a long time (such jokes can take five minutes or more to tell) for no reason at all, as the long-awaited resolution is essentially meaningless, with the joke as a whole playing upon humans' search for meaning." Wikipedia]

Stopping here to interject that the reader can fall down many internet rabbit holes simply by searching for all the names and hidden references that are on every page of this book. The first chapter alone took me at least an hour to get through because I looked up all the proper nouns, some of which led me to interesting factoids and events that tie in to things that happen later in the book, and some of which were just macguffins.

Getting back to the "shaggy dog" chapters -- the only part of the book that had anything like a throughline -- am I the only one who thinks the author got this plot from a AI? It follows the beats of a typical action movie, with improbable chases that criss-cross the world, crazy new tech, narrow escapes, and an arch-villain who turns out to be related to one of the main characters, but everything in it is just a little bit off. Like an uncanny valley in literary terms, rather than in images. This book was written in 2020, before the explosion of ChatGPT into the world, but the idea of an author using an AI to write a novel that will win the Booker is repeated several times in the text. Then there's this monologue from the arch-villain:

But then one day I got it. Or, rather, I should say, my machine got it. It spit out a novel--not really a novel but a cracked-mirror version of one. I started adapting it and integrating it into increasingly sophisticated robots. The novel barely hung together. It was an ever frustrated and constantly interrupted episodic adventure loosely based on my life . . .

Speaking of the author's life, there is a really heartbreaking chapter entitled "Autobiographical Interlude: Mother" that nails the entire piece to reality. This felt like the core of the novel to me. Here, Lim shares snatches of his memories of his parents and grandparents, who immigrated to the US from Korea. His disassociation from the suffering and striving that made them come to the US. His lack of knowledge of his Asian culture. His own feelings upon becoming a father and realizing that his son would one day only have disjointed memories of him. How hard it is to let your child go out into the world knowing they are incapable of ever knowing the sacrifices you made for them.

I remember my parents having paid for all my schooling and that I've no student loans to pay back.

In between the shaggy dog chapters there are chapters in which a group of friends have conversations over lunch. These conversations are like those you used to have when you were in college and thought you knew everything. The topics covered range from the aforementioned grief, to suicide, white privilege in the art world, artificial intelligence, the Japanese internment camps set up in the US during WWII, Buddhist theories of self and not-self, why artists make art, fractals, love, hate and more. There are lots of comments that made me laugh out loud.

Dave, who is Korean American and therefore perhaps slightly biased, says it's okay to appropriate Japanese food culture because they were aggressors in the Second World War.

And then a stunner of a sentence that would make me catch my breath and stop reading for a while:

We may only be alive when trying to make art. Only alive in the attempt. Some friends have stopped trying so might have died without knowing it.

Time to end this review so I can go out and find another book to read by Eugene Lim, my new author crush.

[H Anthony · Rating 5 out of 5]

Grief-riddled and hilarious; fractured and propulsive; plain spoken and cryptic; memoir and fantasy; art theory and art practice. Outstanding.

[in8 · Rating 5 out of 5]

https://5cense.com/22/993.htm