The refugees viet thanh nguyen review năm 2024

Professor Viet Thanh Nguyen teaches English and American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. Already well-established as an academic and scholar, recipient of numerous awards, he made his mark in the literary world when his début novel, The Sympathizer (2015), won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. With the non-fiction study Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the memory of war published in 2016, he has now, with this latest book, published three books in three different genres in three consecutive years.

Nguyen’s parents moved from North to South Vietnam in 1954 and fled to the United States when he was four, after the fall of Saigon in 1975. Settled first in a refugee camp in Pennsylvania, the family later moved to California and opened a Vietnamese grocery store. All of these events find their way into these stories; they mirror Nguyen’s own experience but are not directly autobiographical. They are not ‘about him’ but are, rather, about what he knows.

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Kerryn Goldsworthy won the 2013 Pascall Prize for cultural criticism, and the 2017 Horne Prize for her essay ‘The Limit of the World’. A former Editor of ABR (1986–87), she is one of Australia’s most prolific and respected literary critics. Her publications include several anthologies, a critical study of Helen Garner, and her book Adelaide, which was shortlisted for a Victorian Premier’s Literary Award. In November 2012 she was named as the inaugural ABR Ian Potter Foundation Fellow. Her Fellowship article on reviewing, ‘Everyone’s a Critic’, appeared in the May 2013 issue of ABR.

The Refugees, by Viet Thanh Nguyen – author of Pulitzer Prize winning The Sympathizer (2015) and the National Book Award for Nonfiction nominated Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (2016) – comes instantly recommended, and rightly so, for the fact of Nguyen’s previous and substantial critical acclaim. But that is not the reason you should read this collection of short stories (or at least not the only one).

The Refugees represents something that is, to my mind, uniquely new and of the moment. It’s a work of contemporary American literary fiction, referencing in tone and structure many of the modern giants of that genre (Kurt Vonnegut and Michael Chabon come instantly to mind), it is a work about family and the legacy of parents, and above all it is the narrative of Vietnamese Diaspora following the Vietnam War. Nguyen is delivering the story of the aftermath of the trauma of the war and its fallout, in accessible literary fiction of the highest order, for what feels like the first time.

Where Nguyen set out in The Sympathizer to write a sharp and satirical scenario featuring a character who was, amongst other things, a reprehensibly flawed, chauvinistic, and contrary man, The Refugees seems to have almost the opposite goal in mind. The characters in these stories are flawed, certainly, and they are displaced and confused. They are affected by one another, but never moreso than by their families.

In the first story, ‘Black Eyed Women’, Nguyen taps into something sharply painful, frightening and difficult to behold, as a ghost writer describes a life haunted by the memories and ghosts of her own past as she works on biographies of trauma-celebrities in America, the country she and her family escaped to during the war. The collection carries on from its unflinchingly direct and immensely strong but never heavy-handed starting point to describe the myriad ways that Refugees in America, their children, and those living in other ways in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, live. I can not recommend this book strongly enough.

Viet Thanh Nguyen's new collection of stories, "The Refugees," is as impeccably written as it is timed. The book, a follow-up to Nguyen's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, "The Sympathizer," is dedicated to "all refugees, everywhere." This is an important and incisive book written by a major writer with firsthand knowledge of the human rights drama exploding on the international stage — and the talent to give us inroads toward understanding it.

Nguyen’s acknowledgments do not shy away from his relationship to the book’s title. “Thanks to my father and mother,” he writes. “Refugees in 1954 and again in 1975, they are the most courageous people I know. They saved my life.” He also thanks his partner, refugee writer Lan Duong, and his Harvard-educated older brother, Tung, whom he calls “the original refugee success story.” There is no effort to avoid the identity of “refugee” — this book interrogates the term on political and spiritual levels, and the results are saturated with pain, memory and beauty.

The protagonists of Nguyen’s stories are haunted by past lives and the dead. In the first story, “Black-Eyed Women,” the narrator and her mother are visited by her brother’s unblinking adolescent ghost, who wears the mildewed shorts he’d worn the day he died on an overcrowded boat. “Looking back,” the narrator thinks, “I could see that we had passed our youth in a haunted country.” She recalls stories from the “ancient crones who chewed betel nut and spat its red juice while squatting on their haunches in the market,” and who spun stories about the dead. She cries for “the other girls who had vanished and never come back, including myself.”

In this collection, towns are altered by war, relatives by time. In some stories, decades pass between letters home to Vietnam, as in “Fatherland.” There is a thorny dissonance between past and present. The living protagonists are often forced to carry traumatic visions with them as they try to make their way in a new country. In “I’d Love You to Want Me,” a wife wonders whether her aging husband “remembered their escape from Vung Tau on a rickety fishing trawler.” She recalled washing their faces with saltwater and spit, urging decorum. Among Nguyen’s characters, it seems painful to remember life as a refugee, but unwise to forget it. “I had not forgotten our nameless blue boat,” the narrator of the first story says, “and it had not forgotten me.” She could recall its scent, “rancid with human sweat and excreta.”

Nguyen is skilled at making us feel the disorientation and alienation of these characters navigating displacement. The narrator in “The Other Man” is “anxiously scanning the strange faces” as he lands in San Francisco, weary, unsettled by the traffic and the plaintive sound of radio jingles. He’s even aware of a different quality of light, which “differed from the tropical glare he’d always known.” He sorts through idioms and contractions, and impresses a dinner companion from Hong Kong by sucking “the dimpled skin off a chicken’s foot, leaving only the twiggy bones.” A feeling of homelessness often persists, and the characters are frequently outsiders, forced to ask: Who am I now? One narrator sees his reflection in a windowpane and fails to recognize himself.

The book is fresh, too, in its portrayal of work, central to the refugee experience. One narrator feels lucky to have a job at a liquor store and compares his fate to that of his friends: “The underage ones, like him, had become bar sweeps or houseboys for Americans, while the older, luckier ones dodged army service, becoming thieves or pimps or rich men’s servants. Unlucky ones got drafted.” Characters recall shining boots of American soldiers, and one works in his mother’s grocery store in New Saigon, pricing cans on his knees. Others have forged ahead and become professors, hearing-aid salesmen, ghostwriters and high school counselors, but do so with the knowledge of what hardships came first: penniless months, janitorial jobs and harrowing journeys across the sea.

“The Refugees” is a surprisingly sensual book, despite operating in difficult political and emotional terrain. Nguyen crafts sentences with an eye toward physicality and a keen awareness of bodies and their urges. A brother saves his sister by rendering her androgynous, slashing her long hair with a machete, binding her breasts with the fabric from a ripped T-shirt. One man recalls the pimpled cleavage of a “shivering prostitute” and the rustle of mosquito netting at night as men in a crowded boat masturbated before bed. In “War Years,” a mother charges a thief in her sheer nightgown, while “her breasts swayed like anemones under shallow water.”

In an era where writers and readers debate who gets to write what, it is refreshing and essential to have this work from a writer who knows and feels the terrain on an intellectual, emotional and cellular level — it shows. Nguyen offers stories of aftermath, but also of complexity. He gives us human beings weary of pity and tired of sharing rehearsed stories that make them seem like “one more anonymous young refugee.” In topic and in execution, “The Refugees” is an exquisite book.

Megan Mayhew Bergman is the author of the collections "Birds of a Lesser Paradise" and "Almost Famous Women" and a forthcoming novel, "The Exhibition."