A Man of Two Faces: A Memoir, a History, a Memorial
Description
The highly original, blistering, and unconventional memoir by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sympathizer, which has now sold over one million copies worldwide
With insight, humor, formal invention, and lyricism, in A Man of Two Faces Viet Thanh Nguyen rewinds the film of his own life. He expands the genre of personal memoir by acknowledging larger stories of refugeehood, colonization, and ideas about Vietnam and America, writing with his trademark sardonic wit and incisive analysis, as well as a deep emotional openness about his life as a father and a son.
At the age of four, Nguyen and his family are forced to flee his hometown of Ban Mê Thuột and come to the USA as refugees. After being removed from his brother and parents and homed with a family on his own, Nguyen is later allowed to resettle into his own family in suburban San José. But there is violence hidden behind the sunny façade of what he callsAMERICA TM. One Christmas Eve, when Nguyen is nine, while watching cartoons at home, he learns that his parents have been shot while working at their grocery store, the SàiGòn Mới, a place where he sometimes helps price tins of fruit with a sticker gun. Years later, as a teenager, the blood-stirring drama of the films of the Vietnam War such as Apocalypse Now throw Nguyen into an existential crisis: how can he be both American and Vietnamese, both the killer and the person being killed? When he learns about an adopted sister who has stayed back in Vietnam, and ultimately visits her, he grows to understand just how much his parents have left behind. And as his parents age, he worries increasingly about their comfort and care, and realizes that some of their older wounds are reopening.
Profound in its emotions and brilliant in its thinking about cultural power, A Man of Two Faces explores the necessity of both forgetting and of memory, the promises America so readily makes and breaks, and the exceptional life story of one of the most original and important writers working today.
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About the Author
Viet Thanh Nguyen was born in Vietnam and raised in America. He is the author of The Sympathizer, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and soon to be an HBO Original Series; its sequel, The Committed; the short story collection The Refugees; the nonfiction book Nothing Ever Dies, a finalist for the National Book Award; and is the editor of an anthology of refugee writing, The Displaced. He is the Aerol Arnold Professor of English and American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California and a recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur foundations. He lives in Los Angeles.
Reviews
Praise for Viet
Thanh Nguyen:
"A voice that
shakes the walls of the old literary comfort zone . . . May that voice keep
running like a purifying venom through the mainstream of our
self-regard--through the American dream of distancing ourselves from what we
continue to show ourselves to be."--Jonathan Dee, New Yorker, on The
Committed
"Equal parts Ellison's Invisible
Man and Chang-rae Lee's Henry Park, Nguyen's nameless narrator is a singular
literary creation, a complete original."--Junot Díaz, New York Times
Book Review (cover review), on The
Committed
"The narrator's
voice snaps you up. It's direct, vain, cranky, and slashing--a voice of outraged
intelligence. It's among the more memorable in recent American literature."--Dwight
Garner, New York Times, on The Committed
"Just as The
Sympathizer transformed the hulk of an old spy novel, The
Committed does the same with a tale of noir crime."--Ron
Charles, Washington Post
"The
Sympathizer and The Committed are, to borrow James
Wood's phrase for such novels, perpetual-motion machines, their exuberance
perhaps a suitable method given how vast a subject he aims to tackle. The
breathless voice and sprawling plots of these novels made me think of Midnight's
Children: manic language and impossible story suit the strange truth of
colonialism. Nguyen does Salman Rushdie one better by deploying the conventions
of genre fiction; he gently seduces the reader into two rambling, discursive
works passionately interested in war and violence, race and identity,
colonialism and history."--Rumaan Alam, New York Review of Books
"These two novels
constitute a powerful challenge to an enduring narrative of colonialism and
neo-colonialism. One waits to see what Nguyen, and the man of two faces, will
do next."--Aminatta Forna, Guardian, on The Committed and The
Sympathizer
"One of our great
chroniclers of displacement . . . All Nguyen's fiction is pervaded by a shared
intensity of vision, by stinging perceptions that drift like windblown ashes."--Joyce
Carol Oates, New Yorker
"A layered
immigrant tale told in the wry, confessional voice of a 'man of two minds'--and
two countries, Vietnam and the United States."--Pulitzer Prize Citation
for The Sympathizer
"Remarkable . . .
His book fills a void in the literature, giving voice to the previously
voiceless . . . Compares favorably with masters like Conrad, Greene, and le
Carré . . . An absurdist tour de force that might have been written by a Kafka
or Genet."--Philip Caputo, New York Times Book Review (cover
review), on The Sympathizer
"Intelligent,
relentlessly paced and savagely funny . . . The voice of the double-agent
narrator, caustic yet disarmingly honest, etches itself on the memory."--Sam
Sacks, Wall Street Journal, "Best Books of the Year," on The
Sympathizer
"A fast-paced,
entertaining read . . . A much-needed Vietnamese perspective on the war."--Bill
Gates, Gates Notes, on The Sympathizer
"Extraordinary . .
. Surely a new classic of war fiction . . . I haven't read anything since
Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four that illustrates so palpably how
a patient tyrant, unmoored from all humane constraint, can reduce a man's mind
to liquid."--Ron Charles, Washington Post, on The
Sympathizer
"We've never had a
story quite like this one before . . . Mr. Nguyen is a master of the telling
ironic phrase and the biting detail, and the book pulses with Catch-22-style
absurdities."--Sarah Lyall, New York Times, on The
Sympathizer
"Beautifully
written and meaty . . . I had that kid-like feeling of being inside the book."--Claire
Messud, Boston Globe, on The Sympathizer
"Thrilling in its
virtuosity, as in its masterly exploitation of the espionage-thriller genre . .
. The book's (unnamed) narrator speaks in an audaciously postmodernist voice,
echoing not only Vladimir Nabokov and Ralph Ellison but the Dostoyevsky
of Notes from the Underground."--Joyce Carol Oates, New
Yorker, on The Sympathizer
"Gleaming and
uproarious, a dark comedy of confession filled with charlatans, delusionists
and shameless opportunists . . . The Sympathizer, like Graham
Greene's The Quiet American, examines American intentions, often
mixed with hubris, benevolence and ineptitude, that lead the country into
conflict."--Jeffrey Fleishman, Los Angeles Times, on The
Sympathizer
"Dazzling . . . A
fascinating exploration of personal identity, cultural identity, and what it
means to sympathize with two sides at once."--John Powers, Fresh Air,
NPR, "Books I Wish I'd Reviewed," on The Sympathizer
"As a writer,
[Nguyen] brings every conceivable gift―wisdom, wit, compassion, curiosity―to
the impossible yet crucial work of arriving at what he calls 'a just memory' of
this war."―Kate Tuttle, Los Angeles Times, on Nothing
Ever Dies
"Nguyen's lucid,
arresting, and richly sourced inquiry, in the mode of Susan Sontag and W. G.
Sebald, is a call for true and just stories of war and its perpetual legacy."―Donna
Seaman, Booklist, on Nothing Ever Dies (starred
review)
"A beautiful
collection that deftly illustrates the experiences of the kinds of people our
country has, until recently, welcomed with open arms . . . An urgent, wonderful
collection that proves that fiction can be more than mere storytelling--it can
bear witness to the lives of people who we can't afford to forget."--Michael
Schaub, NPR Books, on The Refugees
"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 . . . 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 . . . An exquisite book."--Megan
Mayhew Bergman, Washington Post, on The Refugees
"Confirms Nguyen
as an agile, trenchant writer, able to inhabit a number of contrary points of
view. And it whets your appetite for his next novel."--Michael
Upchurch, Seattle Times, on The Refugees
"A short-story
collection mostly plumbing the experience of boat-bound Vietnamese who escaped
to California . . . Ultimately, Nguyen enlarges empathy, the high ideal of
literature and the enemy of hate and fear."--Boris Kachka, New York,
on The Refugees
"The book we need
now . . . The most timely short story collection in recent memory . . .
Throughout, Nguyen demonstrates the richness of the refugee experience, while
also foregrounding the very real trauma that lies at its core."--Doree
Shafrir, BuzzFeed, on The Refugees
