Review by New York Times Review
FICTION SUPPOSEDLY "GIVES VOICE" to its characters, but what can it do for those who would rather not speak? In Viet Thanh Nguyen's superb new collection, "The Refugees," men and women displaced from wartime Saigon and resettled in California don't say much about the journey, having practiced many versions of silence - from state censorship to language barriers - along the way. To illustrate their plight, Nguyen homes in on their bodies rather than their words, so that a more accurate description of what the book does is "give flesh" to characters at risk of fading from memory, sometimes their own. The nameless narrator of "Black-Eyed Women," which opens the book, has borne traumas so unspeakable as to reduce her to a spectral shadow of herself - an ironic advantage, in her work as a ghostwriter of disaster memoirs. Less convenient is the actual ghost of her dead brother, whose visit after 25 years calls forth memories of the trans-Pacific voyage only one of them survived. But after touching his fatal wounds, doubting-Thomas-style, the narrator shifts from disappearing into her clients' dramas toward fleshing out her own. Likewise, in "The Other Man," body language is as loud as the refugee story gets. Arriving in San Francisco in 1975, the abject Liem walks "with eyes downcast, as if searching for pennies." Air travel has impaired him: "The lingering pressure in his ears bewildered him further, making it hard for him to understand the P.A. system's distorted English." When his hosts, Parrish and Marcus, reveal that they're lovers, the bombshell strikes Liem on a visceral level, sending "a nervous tremor through his gut," and resonating more deeply than he'll admit aloud: "The small hairs on his arms and on the back of his neck stiffened as they'd done before whenever another boy, deliberately or by chance, had brushed his elbow, sometimes his knee." Soon Parrish leaves town on business; and Liem's body, home alone with Marcus, manages to convey what his voice, in still-halting English, cannot. The aches and pains of migration become especially literal in the bodies of aging refugees. A professor afflicted with dementia in "I'd Love You to Want Me" starts to call his wife of 40 years by a stranger's name. How does she reintroduce herself to the husband for whom she has long replaced official names with "endearments like Anh, for him, or Em, for her"? It's a heartbreaking variation on the couple's return visit to Vietnam, decades after the Communist regime renamed their former street, and Saigon itself. Other characters reckon with liver transplants and broken hips, sleeping pills and Salonpas, their flesh revealing personal and political stresses that escape speech. As concerned with the aftershocks of war as with war itself, "The Refugees" mostly elides grisly scenes like the bombings, killings, rapes and tortures that fill Nguyen's spectacular Pulitzer-winning debut novel, "The Sympathizer" (2015). Here in free-market America - "where possessions counted for everything," the ghostwriter in "Black-Eyed Women" muses - violence tends to strike wealth and personal property instead. Mrs. Hoa, a seamstress in another story, hits up her grocer for political donations, threatening a boycott if she's denied. Nguyen stages the confrontation in the language of military surveillance and "counterattack," with echoes of a harrowing home invasion from earlier in the story. Car theft prefigures vandalism elsewhere, when a veteran tries to mend his son's marriage using tactics he learned as a paratrooper. Collateral damage, it seems, can extend from the battlefield to the suburban strip mall. If at times I found myself missing the playful, voice-driven punch of "The Sympathizer," it's a tribute to Nguyen's range that these eight stories cast a quieter, but no less devastating, spell. The collection's subtle, attentive prose and straightforward narrative style perfectly suit the low-profile civilian lives it explores (the only military personnel here have long retired). With the volume turned down, we lean in more closely, listening beyond what the refugees say to step into their skins. ? MIA ALVAR is the author of the story collection "In the Country."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [January 1, 2017]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Nguyen received a barrage of awards, including the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and the Pulitzer Prize, for his debut, the commanding novel The Sympathizer (2015). A nonfiction work, Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (2016), cast light on the personal experiences and profound historical and cultural inquiry underlying his novel. Nguyen now presents a collection of fluidly modulated yet bracing stories about Vietnamese refugees in the U.S., powerful tales of rupture and loss that detonate successive shock waves. Black-Eyed Women is a ghost story about a ghostwriter who lost her brother during the family's terrifying boat escape. In the exquisitely subtle The Other Man, a Vietnamese refugee welcomed into the San Francisco home of a gay couple struggles with the baffling process of acclimation. A boy witnesses a stunning reversal in the pitched battle between his mother, a Vietnamese woman running a small grocery store, and another woman refugee demanding protection money. Each intimate, supple, and heartrending story is unique in its particulars even as all are works of piercing clarity, poignant emotional nuance, and searing insights into the trauma of war and the long chill of exile, the assault on identity and the resilience of the self, and the fragility and preciousness of memories.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2016 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Each searing tale in Nguyen's follow-up to the Pulitzer-winning The Sympathizer is a pressure cooker of unease, simmering with unresolved issues of memory and identity for the Vietnamese whose lives were disrupted by the "American War." In "Black-Eyed Woman," a writer is visited by the ghost of her teenage brother, who was murdered trying to save her from Thai pirates while fleeing the Vietcong. "War Years" is about a family of Vietnamese grocers in San Jose, Calif., challenged by another refugee to donate money to rebels still fighting the Communists back home. When an armed intruder invades the family's home, the piercing irony is that their youngest son thinks it's safe to open the door because the man is white. In "The Transplant," Arthur Arellano is the recipient of a new liver from Men Vu, a Vietnamese man killed in a hit-and-run, whose son befriends him, then makes him complicit in his shady business selling fake designer goods. The most disturbing story is "Fatherland," in which a man names his second set of children in Vietnam after his first set, who have fled to America with his first wife. When the American Phuong (now Vivien) visits her sister Phuong in Vietnam, Vivien reveals she is not the doctor her mother boasted she was. It is clear that author Nguyen believes the Vietnamese Phuong, more self-aware and resolute, is better off than her American doppelganger. Nguyen is not here to sympathize-"always resent, never relent," as the anti-Communist exiles proclaimed in The Sympathizer-but to challenge the experience of white America as the invisible norm. Agent: Nat Sobel, Sobel Weber Associates. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Although publishing ten months after Nguyen won the Pulitzer Prize for The Sympathizer, this collection precedes his novel by decades (the earliest entry dates from 1997). In a pre-Pulitzer interview [ow.ly/qXus3057v1g], Nguyen credits a 15-year experience "characterized by drudgery and despair, laced with a few bright moments when the stories were published or won awards" as the labor necessary to produce his stupendous Sympathizer. These eight stories encompass migration, loss, and disconnect as characters navigate and stumble through memories, experiences, and perceived realities. Two siblings reconnect in "Black-Eyed Women" decades after their deadly boat escape from Vietnam. The children of refugees serve as both witnesses and enablers to their dislocated parents in "War Years," "Someone Else Besides You," and "Fatherland." Unlikely connections haunt two of the most resonating stories: an aging man with dementia begins to call his wife by someone else's name in "I'd Love You To Want Me," while an organ recipient meets the donor's family in "The Transplant." VERDICT For Nguyen groupies desperate for future titles, Refugees is a highly gratifying interlude. For short fiction fans of other extraordinary, between-culture collections such as -Daniyal Mueenuddin's In Other Rooms, Other Wonders and Jhumpa Lahiri's Unaccustomed Earth, Nguyen won't disappoint. Either way, highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, 8/8/16.]-Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon, Washington, DC © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A collection of stories, most set amid the Vietnamese exile communities of California, by the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Sympathizer (2015)."We had passed our youth in a haunted country," declares the narrator of the opening story, a ghostwriter who quite literally finds himself writing about ghosts. One in particular is the ghost of his brother, lost somewhere in the chaos of the Vietnam War, who has somehow managed to swim across the ocean to find his family and is now dripping in their hallway. He is not the only ghost: there are other civilians, the eviscerated Korean lieutenant blown apart in a treetop, the unfortunate black GI, "the exposed half-moon of his brain glistening above the water," and the Japanese private from another warso many ghosts, so much horror. Some of the living are not much better off. There is, for example, the Madame Thieu-like operator who works the merchants of a refugee shopping district, demanding what amounts to protection money and darkly hinting that they might be accused of being Communists if they do not pay up; she nurses a terrible grief, but that does not make her any less criminal. And then there is the 30-something divorc, torn between cultures, who cannot seem to find himself in the midst of all the expectations others hold for him but is still enraged when others disappoint him in turn. Nguyen's slice-of-life approach is precise without being clinical, archly humorous without being condescending, and full of understanding; many of the stories might have been written by a modern Flaubert, if that master had spent time in San Jose or Ho Chi Minh City. Nguyen is the foremost literary interpreter of the Vietnamese experience in America, to be sure. But his stories, excellent from start to finish, transcend ethnic boundaries to speak to human universals. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
