Disappear Doppelgänger Disappear by Matthew Salesses
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Matt Kim is a man who feels himself slowly disappear. People bump into him in the street as if they can’t see him and his actions appear to have no impact on his environment. He is estranged from his family. As a Korean man raised by Irish Catholic adoptive parents in Boston, he feels unmoored — neither Asian enough nor American enough. He melts into the space between the walls. He soon finds that he has a doppelganger — a double who seems to be a better version of himself. His girlfriend Yumi (You-me… get it?) is going through a similar experience.
The delivery is surreal and feels like someone trying to describe a dream before it slips away. Dreams occur in a part of the brain that doesn’t process lasting memories. If you want to remember the shards of a dream you had before it slips away, you have to articulate it by writing it down, telling it to someone or at least going over it in your mind before you fully awake. The first quarter of the book feels like that’s what Matt Kim is doing — articulating the misty remnants of his life to try to hold onto it.
As the story moves on it becomes more grounded, coinciding with his trying to rekindle his relationship with his pre-teen daughter. Still, he feels invisible, in part because he’s an Asian man in Boston, which in the book is rife with dudebros, the KKK and white supremacists in red caps.
The story can be hard to follow at times because of the surreal quality, but it’s a good read if you take your time.
I received this Advance Reader Copy of Disappear Doppelgänger Disappear from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
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Description
From the bestselling author of The Hundred-Year Flood comes an incredibly entertaining and profoundly affecting tour de force about 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’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.
