Disappear doppelgänger disappear A novel

Matthew Salesses

Book - 2020

"A Korean American man's strange and ordinary attempts to exist. Matt Kim is always tired. He keeps passing out. His cat is dead. His wife and daughter have left him. He's estranged from his adoptive family. People bump into him on the street as if he isn't there. He is pretty sure he's disappearing. His girlfriend, Yumi, is less convinced. But then she runs into someone who looks exactly like her, and her doppelgänger turns out to have dated someone who looks exactly like Matt. Except the other Matt was superior in every way. He was clever, successful, generous, and beloved--until one day he suddenly and completely vanished without warning. How can Matt Kim protect his existence when a better version of him wasn&#...039;t able to? Or is his worse life a reason for his survival? Set in a troubling time in which a presidential candidate is endorsed by the KKK and white men in red hats stalk Harvard Square, Disappear Doppelgänger Disappear is a haunting and frighteningly funny novel about Asian American stereotypes, the desires that make us human, puns, and what happens to the self when you have to become someone else to be seen."--Provided by publisher.

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Subjects
Genres
Psychological fiction
Social problem fiction
Published
New York : Little A [2020]
Language
English
Main Author
Matthew Salesses (author)
Physical Description
297 pages ; 22 cm
ISBN
9781503943261
9781503943254
Contents unavailable.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

An alcoholic, depressed Korean American man is convinced he is disappearing as a KKK-endorsed candidate runs for president in the captivating latest from Salesses (The Hundred-Year Flood). Three years after Matt Kim's wife and daughter left him and he's unable to sell his novel, Matt struggles to hold onto his sense of self. He explains to his girlfriend, Yumi, that as an Asian man he feels invisible in public. At the butcher shop, he's ignored by the man at the counter. In a row of empty urinals, men stand right next to him. Worse than feeling invisible, he fears two white "dudebros" in red hats are following him. Asked if they see him, they respond by calling him "Charlie Chan." Then, after getting drunk, Yumi introduces herself as Sandra and shows Matt a photo of herself with her boyfriend, Matt Chung, whom she says disappeared. "The boyfriend in the photo was me," Matt realizes, and proceeds to investigate Chung's disappearance, while the KKK-backed candidate paves the way to victory with racist statements. The use of surrealism to interrogate the erasure of Asian American bodies and the trauma of being disappeared by whiteness is heightened by angled takes on recent history (the red hats worn by the men following Matt say "something about this country we all lived in, that it wasn't great anymore"). Salesses's tale on the nature of existence triumphs with literary trickery. Agent: Ayesha Pande, Pande Literary. (Aug.)

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