In his 1961 book, What Is History?, the British historian E. H. Carr sought to answer that very question. Carr argued that history is a perpetual dialogue between the past and the present, that it is never neutral or objective. Ed Park has a slightly more idiosyncratic way of putting it in his new novel, Same Bed Different Dreams, but he essentially lands in the same place. One character, a Korean writer working under the pen name Echo, offers that history is “a) a vital lesson b) amusement for the idle c) the sum of symbols d) a record of pain.” It is a slippery, elusive story that largely depends on one’s point of view. Same Bed Different Dreams is something of an alternative account of 20th-century Korea. It does not proceed chronologically, nor does it tell a coherent, single narrative. Instead, Park relies on ghostly manuscripts, letters, interviews, historical documents, anecdotes, and a collage of fact and fiction. The novel seems to take its stylistic inspiration from the 13th-century text Samguk Yusa, a chronicle …