Chinatown
Thuan
(Author)
Nguyen An Lý
(Translator)
Description
An abandoned package is discovered in the Paris Metro: the subway workers suspect it's a terrorist bomb. A Vietnamese woman sitting nearby, her son asleep on her shoulder, waits and begins to reflect on her life, from her constrained childhood in communist Hanoi, to a long period of study in Leningrad during the Gorbachev period, and finally to the Parisian suburbs where she now teaches English. Through everything runs her passion for Thuy, the father of her son, a writer who lives in Saigon's Chinatown, and who, with the shadow of the China-Vietnam border war falling darkly between them, she has not seen for eleven years.Through her breathless, vertiginous, and deeply moving monologue from beside the subway tracks, the narrator attempts to once and for all face the past and exorcize the passion that haunts her.
Product Details
Price
$16.95
$15.76
Publisher
New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publish Date
June 21, 2022
Pages
184
Dimensions
5.1 X 7.8 X 0.5 inches | 0.4 pounds
Language
English
Type
Paperback
EAN/UPC
9780811231886
BISAC Categories:
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About the Author
THUAN(Doan Anh Thuan) was born in 1967 in Hanoi. Chinatown is her twelfth novel and her first to be translated into English. She is a recipient of the Writers' Union Prize, the highest award in Vietnamese literature.
Nguyen An Lý lives in Vietnam and co-edits the online, independent, open-access Zzz Review. Her translations, mostly from English into Vietnamese, include works by authors such as Margaret Atwood, Kazuo Ishiguro, George Orwell, and Amos Oz.
Reviews
Chinatown is a fever dream, a hallucination, a loop in time and life that Thuan masterfully deploys to capture the disorienting and debilitating effects of migration, racism, and a broken heart in both Viet Nam and France. I was completely immersed in this spellbinding novel.--Viet Thanh Nguyen
Thu?n, in her English-language debut, delivers a powerful examination of a woman's remembering and forgetting....Comprised of a single, breathless paragraph interrupted only by the occasional excerpt from I'm Yellow, her novel in progress about a man who leaves his family, Thu?n's tightly coiled narrative paints a portrait of a woman desperately trying to make sense of her past ("You must forget in order to live," she claims). As the woman's thoughts spin round and round, Thu?n draws the reader ever closer to the question at the core of the novel: Is it actually possible to forget in order to live? This heralds a remarkable new voice.-- "Publishers Weekly"
[A] delightfully prickly and defiantly inscrutable act of resistance: against simple narratives, against our aversion to what we don't understand, and against anything soullessly practical.--Chelsea Leu "Astra Magazine"
Thu?n, in her English-language debut, delivers a powerful examination of a woman's remembering and forgetting....Comprised of a single, breathless paragraph interrupted only by the occasional excerpt from I'm Yellow, her novel in progress about a man who leaves his family, Thu?n's tightly coiled narrative paints a portrait of a woman desperately trying to make sense of her past ("You must forget in order to live," she claims). As the woman's thoughts spin round and round, Thu?n draws the reader ever closer to the question at the core of the novel: Is it actually possible to forget in order to live? This heralds a remarkable new voice.-- "Publishers Weekly"
[A] delightfully prickly and defiantly inscrutable act of resistance: against simple narratives, against our aversion to what we don't understand, and against anything soullessly practical.--Chelsea Leu "Astra Magazine"
