From my spring reading roundup 2017 in (Boone, N.C.) Mountain Times featuring "The Refugees":

While it’s undeniable that spring is in the air in the High Country, it’s equally true that the warm and sunny months of summer are a few months off. With that in mind, Mountain Times has assembled a spring reading list — a variety of books and authors you may have missed between the rush of the holiday season and the urge to get out in your garden. Take your pick among them, and before you know it you’ll be well-prepped for our next project: the Mountain Times summer reading list.

Fiction

“Fever Dream” by Samanta Scheweblin

Samanta Scheweblin was named one of the 22 best writers in Spanish younger than 35 by Granta, and debut novel “Fever Dream” (Riverhead Books) shows us why. A haunting, deceptively thin book, Scheweblin’s novel has been called a “ghost story for the real world.” Amanda lies dying in a rural clinic while David, a young boy, sits beside her. They are not mother and son, but together they conjure a desperate and cautionary tale. The ending of this one will not fail to surprise. Strange and psychological, “Fever Dream” comes to us in English translated by Megan McDowell.

“The Red Sphinx” by Alexandre Dumas

“The Red Sphinx” (Pegasus Books) is not a new novel, but falls into the category of “who knew?” As in, who knew — at least in contemporary times — that Alexandre Dumas had written more than one sequel to “The Three Musketeers?” Dumas published his well-known masterpiece in 1844, and shortly after wrote the sequel, “Twenty Years After.” Near the end of his career, Dumas again went to the well and drew inspiration from “The Three Musketeers” and wrote “The Red Sphinx,” a novel that picks up a mere 20 days after his signature novel ends. Part of the reason that “The Red Sphinx” has languished in publication is that Dumas never finished it. In this volume, Pegasus Books takes the 25 finished chapters and combines it with a completed novella, “The Dove,” detailing the final exploits of Moret and Cardinal Richelieu. And, so we have “The Red Sphinx,” with its nearly 800 pages newly translated by Lawrence Ellsworth.

“No Man’s Land” by Simon Tolkien

Say the name Tolkien and most bibliophiles get all tingly, and with “No Man’s Land,” (Nan A. Talese) there is certainly reason for the feeling as Simon Tolkien draws on the World War I real-life experiences of his grandfather, J.R.R. Tolkien. A journey tale, “No Man’s Land” follows Adam Raine from a young boy plagued by hard luck through the challenges of losing his mother, a difficult relocation to a coal mining town and the world of a nobleman who never lets him get above his rank. Yet, Adam finds love and earns a scholarship to Oxford and seems to be on a path to a better life — until the World War breaks out and everything is threatened. Different from anything his grandfather wrote, you'll nevertheless note that writing talent is a family affair for the Tolkiens.

“The World To Come: Stories” by Jim Shepard

In his fifth collection of short stories, Jim Shepard presents 10 tales, and a book full of original voices. “The World To Come: Stories” (Knopf) showcases Shepard’s unique talent of condensing a full novel into three dozen pages, with each outcome a satisfying read. From chronicling English Arctic explorers to the story of crew members in danger on a World War II submarine, Shepard continues to showcase his gift of writing fiction that brings the long ago and far away to our present reality. Shepard has been called the “best living writer of short fiction currently publishing in America.” “The World to Come” helps make the case.

“The Refugees” by Viet Thanh Nguyen

From the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction-winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen (“The Sympathizer”) comes another powerful book, this one of short stories, “The Refugees” (Grove Press). Timely and unpredictable, these stories offer two distinct worlds and center on the hardships of immigration — from a young Vietnamese refugee experiencing culture upheaval when he comes to live with two men in San Francisco, to a wonderfully tender, yet harsh, story of a woman whose husband is on the throes of dementia and begins to confuse her with a former lover. Thanh Nguyen humanizes the refugee experience in small bites that offer a place at the table for all of us.

“New York 2140” by Kim Stanley Robinson

In the vein of “it had to happen,” Kim Stanley Robinson’s “New York 2140” (Orbit) follows the lives of several apartment dwellers in a building in Manhattan after global warming has pushed all the world’s coastlines underwater. From the pen of Robinson, winner of the Hugo, Nebula and Locus awards, all of the “what-ifs” and “whys” are covered — from the science behind the tides to the economic fallout. The novel is tied tightly together in an ending that is worth the journey of the author’s meticulous prose and more than 600 pages of story that explores how skyscrapers may have become islands, but for the residents of one building, life goes on.

Poetry

“A Sunday In Purgatory” by Henry Morgenthau III

Wonderfully accessible, “A Sunday In Purgatory” (Passager Books) is part memoir, part cultural exploration, but all written by a man who has reached his centennial year. Henry Morgenthau III’s poetry is insightful and, at times, heartbreakingly honest — “Unexpectedly I caught sight/ of an old guy the other day,/ in a mirror. A crippled derelict/ stumbling forward/ in a slow syncopated hobble./ I tried to turn away from/ that unsightly image of myself” (“Unsightly Image”). For sure, you will see Morgenthau, and yourself, differently by the end of the book of verse written with precision and nuance.

“It’s Good Weather for Fudge: Conversing with Carson McCullers” by Sue Brannon Walker

So, what if you were a former Alabama state poet laureate who wanted to imagine a conversation with Carson McCullers in celebration of that famous author’s centenary birth anniversary in 2017? What you would come up with would be Sue Brannon Walker’s “It’s Good Weather for Fudge: Conversing with Carson McCullers” (NewSouth Books), a poetic tribute to the author of “The Heart is a Lonely Hunter” and other works. Walker shows expert knowledge of McCuller’s canon, but diffuses the literary journey with pleasant inroads into the life of the author. Fans of McCullers’ works will want this essential companion piece.

Nonfiction

“Days of Awe and Wonder: How to Be a Christian in the 21st Century” by Marcus J. Borg

Two years after the liberal theologian’s death, Marcus J. Borg still has something to offer those who wish to explore progressive Christianity. “Days of Awe and Wonder” (HarperOne) includes never before published selections of the author’s work in an anthology that demands an open mind and the questioning of assumptions in the context of contemporary society.

“The Unsettlers: In Search of the Good Life in Today’s America” by Mark Sundeen

In this work of immersive journalism, Mark Sundeen profiles the quests of those in search of a life more simple than the demands of a 24/7, electronic, Twitter-driven society. “The Unsettlers” (Riverhead Books) offers a chronicle of those who have opted out of mainstream culture — and how difficult that journey can be.

“The Life and Work of John C. Campbell” by Olive Dame Campbell and edited by Elizabeth M. Williams

A pioneer in the study of Appalachian mountaineers, John C. Campbell traveled with his wife, Olive Dame Campbell, throughout the region to interview and write about the people who live there. Campbell wrote the definitive work on the area, “The Southern Highlander and His Homeland,” a work still cited today by major scholars studying the region. Editor Elizabeth McClutchen Williams’ work, “The Life and Work of John C. Campbell” (University Press of Kentucky), now offers the first critical edition of Oliver Dame Campbells’ unfinished overview of her husband’s life. Using the first-account resources of diaries and letters, this exhaustive volume provides unique insights into the life of the educator.

“Conversations with Ron Rash” edited by Mae Miller Claxton and Rain Newcomb

There is no better author of Appalachian fiction than Ron Rash, and this volume, “Conversations with Ron Rash” (University Press of Mississippi) offers honest and in-depth profiles of the author. Rash’s connection to Watauga County, N.C., is well-documented, but in this volume, dozens of interviews explore how that connection ultimately came to fruition in “Serena” and other prize-winning novels and volumes of poetry. Rash shares much through these interviews, including much about the writing process itself. Editors Mae Miller Claxton and Rain Newcomb have done a fine job assembling interviews from the beginning of Rash’s writing career (“The Night the New Jesus Fell to Earth") through 2015’s “Above the Waterfall.” The passion and exactitude of the author is on fine display here in a volume essential for anyone studying Rash’s career and works.

<b>Poster-board short stories!

4.8 stars</b>

You’ll hear lots of reviewers gushing about this collection of stories. Believe them. In fact, I won’t start slinging around glowing adjectives myself because there’s a traffic jam—there are so many ohs and ahs on the road, I don’t need to add to the verbal carbon imprint. Why bore you with the same old story? Once you’ve heard this book gem is shiny bright, you don’t need to hear everyone in the world repeat glowing words about its glowing existence. Let me just say that this is a beautiful collection of stories about Vietnamese refugees who’ve ended up in America.

Even though the gems are shiny, they aren’t flashy. Nguyen doesn’t describe the characters’ often harrowing trips to a new land, though the journeys are alluded to and make the characters and their dilemmas much more complex and heartfelt. Instead, Nguyen’s stories are about what their lives are like once they get to America. His characters are not heroes or victims, but ordinary people who are just trying to get by and who face relationship problems that are familiar to us all: situations that make us sad or confused or jealous, and situations that can change the way we think, that humble us or steal our innocence.

I’m in awe of how unique the stories are—there’s a lot of variety. The book starts out with a ghost story, which made me gulp, since I usually don’t like ghosts (I prefer live people, sorry). I needn’t have worried, though—it’s a literary ghost story (it’s literary because it has depth and no silliness), and it’s poignant and memorable. One of my favorites is a story about a remarried man who gave his second set of kids the same names as the first. Where did Nguyen come up with that??!! The twin-named daughters (one lives in the United States and one lives in Vietnam) meet for the first time, and there is posturing and jealousy.

Another of my favorites is about an elderly couple dealing with the husband’s Alzheimer’s. The man continues to call his wife by another name, and the wife wonders if her husband has had a secret affair in his past. Super well done. I noticed that I could relate to the stories about women more than the stories about men, and it made me wonder if that’s usually the case. It’s to Nguyen’s credit that he can portray women characters so brilliantly.

The stories are understated, and they’re tight, sturdy, and nuanced. What is especially cool is that each story has the richness and depth of a novel. It’s amazing that Nguyen could create such complex characters, people whom I cared about deeply, within the confines of a short story. I didn’t highlight much—the stories didn’t take any philosophical detours, but instead kept on track with the plot, which made them stronger I think. The characters weren’t really introspective, and that, too, made the collection stronger: no side trips inside heads. I learned a little about the Vietnam War, and I liked being enlightened. The fact that it wasn’t preachy helped.

None of the stories ended in huge drama. The endings were super realistic but a little frustrating at times, because sometimes they seemed to fizzle out and I wanted more closure. I do have to admit that there really is some closure, just quiet closure, not fireworks, and that the endings are true to the story. Real-life stories don’t often end with a bang either.

Oh, and did I ever have another ebook adventure! There’s a story about a man who has had a transplant and who lets his donor’s son store black market goods in his garage (see what I mean about weird stories?!). Transplant man has a wife who is annoyed by him. At the end of the story, in the middle of the page, the wife folds her arms over her chest. Then in a super large and bold font, all caps, hand-written, the last lines read:

<b>I’D LOVE YOU TO WANT ME
I’D LOVE YOU TO WANT ME</b>

I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why Nguyen would end the story that way. It made no sense; it wasn’t in line with the story at all. Was it the husband or the wife who was saying or thinking that? And why on earth would this dramatic statement be made? If it was the wife, the loud comment was totally out of character. It’s not Nguyen’s style at all! Or was the bizarre ending super clever and I was missing something big? I reread the story, hoping to make sense of it. I was disappointed in Nguyen for being so cryptic and for not having a tidy story.

I went to write down comments about the story, noting, of course, how the ending was disappointing and made no sense. Then I went to the Table of Contents in my Kindle and began to write down the next story title. Guess what? The next story was called I’D LOVE YOU TO WANT ME! Ah, so those words had actually been the title of the next story, not the last two lines of the previous one. Holy moly, no wonder it hadn’t made sense! Ah, the problem with advance copies! It makes me laugh now—I love it when language or format plays a trick on me, especially if a mystery is solved in the process, and story sense is restored.

Okay, away from my crazy reading experience and back to the stories: Given the subject matter, I worried going into this collection that the stories would be message-y or victim-y, but that was definitely not the case here. If you love short stories, this poster-board collection won’t disappoint. If you’re iffy about short stories, these gems are liable to shine bright and make a believer out of you—they’re that good. It’s no wonder Nguyen won a Pulitzer for his novel [book:The Sympathizer|23168277]. I’ll be checking that one out soon!

(Okay, okay, so I lied: I <i>did</i> join the traffic jam full of gush, as is clear by how long this review is! Verbal imprints be damned! Is it my fault I can’t shut up?)

Thanks to NetGalley for the advance copy.

As I was actually reading them I thoroughly enjoyed these moving and compassionate stories but as with so many collections I can now hardly distinguish one from the other. Not that each individual story isn’t well written but no one story in particular stood out for me. I thoroughly enjoyed The Sympathizer but overall found this collection, although worthy, unremarkable.

3.5 Stars.

These were interesting short stories. Every story was different but they all focused on family and relationships and they all revolved around people with roots in Vietnam/ties to Vietnam. I did enjoy reading these stories and I thought they were all done very well, even if I didn't particularly like some of the stories. Every single character was fleshed out, which was very impressive and the writing was also good. I think this book is very relevant right now. So many people are against immigrants and refugees coming into their country. This book highlights how we are all the same. We all go through similar things that these characters go through like grief, deception, infidelity, sexuality concerns, relationship problems, resentment towards family members, etc. Just because someone comes from a different place, it doesn't mean that they are fundamentally different.

I would recommend this book & I would read more by Viet Thanh Nguyen.


Black-Eyed Woman - 4/5
The Other Man - 4/5
War Years - 5/5
The Transplant - 2/5
I'd Love You To Want Me -3.5/5
The Americans - 2/5
Someone Else Besides You - 3/5
Fatherland - 5/5

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

"“The dead move on,” he had said, coiled in his armchair, hands between his thighs. “But the living, we just stay here.”"

"His habit of forgetting was too deeply ingrained, as if he passed his life perpetually walking backward through a desert, sweeping away his footprints, leaving him with only scattered recollections..."

A very important read nowadays and if you are interested in the subject you should definitly give it a go.
However, in most stories I didn't feel connected to the characters.
Actual rating: 3.5 stars

For days, I’ve been struggling to come up with the right words to describe this collection of short stories. It seems impossible to do them justice with my limited vocabulary. The stories are subtle, but not stark. Quiet but full of meaning. The sentences are eloquent, the stories direct. These stories are about immigration, and finding your way in a foreign land, about the struggles of getting to a new country, and the pain of leaving the old one. They are about the pasts we never think about, pasts that are put behind to make the best foot forward, about defining yourself and finding a way to fit where it seems you don’t belong. But it’s also about love and loss and sacrifice, understanding and acceptance, family and obligation, redefining ourselves, and the many faces we wear. Most importantly, particularly given our current political climate, these stories give life to refugees, humanizing them in a way that heartbreaking news stories don’t, showing them as more than the tragedy that has been visited upon them, showing them as people, like us, humans of flesh and blood, heart and soul, who want the same things most people do.

The Refugees is by Viet Thanh Nguyen, author of The Sympathizer, a book that won many awards. This collection is a very fine group of short stories, which are tender and moving. In the first story, a woman who is a ghost writer for other authors is haunted by her own ghost-her dead brother who has returned, lost, to seek out answers. The answers to his questions, and her pain, lie in their long-ago flight from Vietnam.

All the stories deal in some way with the characters complicated relationship to the beautiful, tragic country they have left behind (or, in the last story, they have been left behind to cope as best they can with the aftermath of the war in Vietnam. Vietnam itself is a character-scarred, beloved, feared, rejected. As I said, a complicated country whose people can neither stay nor completely leave behind.

In another story, Nguyen write of a young man who has left his family and ended up living with a gay couple in San Francisco. As he struggles to make sense of his new surroundings, he finds he also has to struggle with his identity. Caught between two worlds, even the children struggle to create their hybrid identity and come to terms with their life in this new world.

A man whose father fled Vietnam is so afraid of becoming his father that he is unable to create a new family. His father's intrusiveness into the relationship is both unbearable and touching. Even characters who have lived in the United States are haunted by their parents relationship with their country of origin.

In the last story, we are in Vietnam, seeing the world through the eyes of a young woman whose father fought (as all these characters did-hence why they are refugees) against the Communists. Her father's first wife left him to come to the United States and in the story his daughter from his first family comes to visit. His second daughter longs to leave her beautiful but impoverished, broken land and hopes to find answers in her half-sister. But as in so many of these stories, the sister is not what she seems to be and bears her own scars of flight.

Each story seemed perfect to me. They are beautifully written and so vivid I felt as though I were there with the characters only with the grace of seeing their hearts and minds and glimpsing the lives they are living as well as the lives are left.

Thank you NetGalley, Grove Atlantic, and Viet Thanh Nguyen for giving me the opportunity to read these wonderful stories in exchange for an honest review.

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Viet Thanh Nguyen: The Refugees, 9780802126399, hardback, Grove Press, available
With his novel “The Sympathizers” Viet Thanh Nguyen won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. I have always been interested in Vietnam, one of the most beautiful countries I ever had the pleasure visiting. My generation still recalls the Vietnam War vividly, the boat people and the wave of Vietnamese refugees coming to the US and Western countries. “The Sympathizers” is still sitting on my reading list but I just downloaded and read his recently released collection of literary short stories, “The Refugees”.
These short stories written over a longer time period of time give an excellent portrait of Vietnamese refugee life in the US. But they apply to feelings all refugees share, especially those born in their parents adopted country struggling with the scars immigration left on their family history. These are multi-facetted stories about everyday life such as that of the refugee who is given a new home in the apartment of a gay couple in San Francisco of the Seventies and the culture shock he suffers. A Vietnamese women, whose husband is suffering from dementia, is extremely irritated when he starts calling her by another woman’s name, clearly the lover he left behind. Disturbing to me was the story of a man who has returned to former Saigon, now Ho Chi Minh City, where he has given the children of his new family with his former mistress and now second wife exactly the same names as the family he left behind in the US. And the bully of an ex-military man who is visiting his bi-racial daughter who is now living in Vietnam working for a charity organization, where they run into the same conflicts dividing them already in the US. The sense of struggle of having two identities runs like a thread through all these keenly observed, beautifully crafted stories.

*Thank you to NetGalley & the publisher for this eARC in exchange for an honest review.*

Pub date: February 7, 2017

An eclectic mix of short stories linked by an unflinching, resilient theme, The Refugees is extremely relevant and especially important in today’s social climate. The stories focus on human emotion and mutual experience rather than delving into politics. That’s where the book draws its strength.

The first story was my favorite, but they all had fascinating points of view and explored new territory. They were both subtle and hard-hitting. Recommended for anyone who wants to widen their scope of the world.

I'm clearly the odd one out here, so take this review with a huge grain of salt (and be sure to read other reviews if you're considering this book). I never read The Sympathizer, so I'm not sure if I just don't click with this author's style, or if I just didn't click with this book. Instead of being moved (or even) caring about the characters in the stories contained in this collection I found my brain wandering and surprised at how long it was taking me to read such a short book. It could also be that I'm overloaded with the magnitude and importance of this issue, and that after a daily dose of stories and I heard on NPR and read in the NYT, The Atlantic, The New Yorker and other publications, that by time I would pick up this book in the evening my brain (and heart) just couldn't handle any more.

Thank you to NetGalley and Grove Press for a galley of this book in exchange for an honest review.

We had previously enjoyed the author's novel, The Sympathizer. His writing style in this short story collection obviously felt much different. The prose is spare, and it felt like each story dealt with a different facet of the Vietnamese refugee experience. Indeed, the story The Americans was only periphally about Vietnam and much more about family dynamics. But beautifully written, provocative, and personal.

I received an ARC via Net Galley in return for an honest review.

A powerful and compelling collection of stories about refugees. Many of these short stories stuck with me for a long time and I often found myself thinking about them in quiet moments. I'm very grateful to have been given the opportunity to read this and I would absolutely recommend to fellow readers.

The Refugees by Pulitzer prize winner Viet Thanh Nguyen is a collection of eight short stories about Vietnamese refugees in the United States. The author himself is a refugee and a child of refugees. Thus, in many ways, these stories are a reflection of his own experiences. The word that comes to mind through all these stories is haunting. Based on that, I will be adding The Sympathizer to my reading list.

Read my complete review at http://www.memoriesfrombooks.com/2017/02/the-refugees.html

Reviewed for NetGalley

When Viet Thanh Nguyen rocketed into the global literary pantheon last year with the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, it was only natural that publishers should start looking for other Vietnamese-born writers to join the bandwagon. Luckily, Nguyen’s publishers had the man himself on hand to supply them with a pocketful of short stories, until he comes through with a follow-up to the much lauded The Sympathizer.

If that sounds cynical, it’s not meant to. The Sympathizer is a bold, bright, ambitious and beautifully written book. Its coruscating light is inevitably going to put short stories in its shadow.

Yet the nine stories that make up this brief volume are a delight. It is written from an array of viewpoints, and its characters include young gay men, American tourists with “blended” families touring Southeast Asia, children, middle-aged Mexicans and Vietnamese waitresses.

The one thing that unites all of the stories is the semi-dreaded “immigrant experience”. Nguyen is never less than acute on the trials and tribulations of newly minted citizens, from relatives in Vietnam who “periodically mailed us thin letters thick with trouble”, to conversations in San Francisco’s Japantown, “talking instead about Jack Nicholson, whose films Liem had never seen, and Western Europe, which Liem had never visited, and the varieties of sushi, which Liem had never eaten before”.

And he slyly weaves in commentary on the hypocrisy of his adopted homeland. A Chinese seller of counterfeit goods pretends to be Vietnamese, and calls himself Louis Vu, after Louis Vuitton. The handbags and other ephemera he deals in, those badges of Western belonging, are branded with good foreign names: Donna Karan, Calvin Klein, Jimmy Choo, Hedi Slimane, Dolce & Gabbana, Gucci, Fendi and Versace. The uniforms of acceptance reek of an unnoticed other.

Probably the best story here is the final one, in which a child of a first marriage, brought up in the United States, comes to visit the second family in Ho Chi Minh City. The second set of children are named, bathetically, after the first. But there the similarities end.

“Phuong’s namesake, for example, was seven years older, fifteen centimetres taller, twenty kilos heavier, and, from the record of the photographs included with the letters, in possession of fairer, clearer skin; a thinner, straighter nose; and hair, clothing, shoes, and makeup that only became ever more fashionable as she graduated from a private girls’ school, then from an elite college, followed by medical school and then a residency in Chicago. Mr. Ly had laminated each of the photographs to protect them from humidity and fingerprints.”

The elder Phuong’s two-week vacation is an eye-opener for all involved: not funny or melodramatic but clarifying, redemptive and bittersweet.

The layers of deception involved, self-administered and often self-requested, work as an indictment of the idea that migration is ever a simple, transactional affair. Everyone is hurt here, everyone is holding in the pain of not being as usual; yet no one knows what “as usual” is. For “Phuong’s Namesake”, deception is at the very heart of what she is willing to share; for the originally named Phuong, all she has is her simple relative poverty, for the new Phuong, her new life is essentially worthless. New Phuong’s gift to the old Phuong sums up the gulf between them — sexual and intimate, yet entirely defined by its surface.

If Nguyen inevitably invites comparisons with Vietnam’s last literary Next Big Thing, short story sensation Nam Le, it is to the benefit of both. Both are Vietnam-born and raised in the West, both are relatively young and well educated; both have been garlanded with armfuls of literary awards and translated into dozens of languages.

But if Le’s palette is broader — Iranian politics, teenage hit men in Colombia, cancer-ridden New York painters — Nguyen’s is intensely focussed on the dislocation of immigration. And if the two writers share motifs and themes, especially the appalling physical hardships of the boat journey fleeing Vietnam, they both manage the impressive feat of precisely rendering the fleeting moment.

Which is, in the end, exactly what the short story is for. Forget all the chatter about the form being perfectly suited to our digital-mobile-device quantum-attention-span age — the short story is a beautiful affirmation of the supreme importance of art in our daily lives. And Viet Thanh Nguyen drives that point home brilliantly.

DNF @66%

I gave this book not one, not two, but five separate attempts and shots for me to really get into the story and start enjoying it. I think that I went into it with the wrong expectation, because for some reason I thought that this was going to be a full-length novel but immediately when I looked it up I realized that it was a collection of short stories. And I wasn't reading one short story from the beginning to the end at one time, I was kind of just dipping in my toes when I had the time.

I think that I started this book over a month ago, and it's been a chore to try and continue and keep on reading. I honestly wanted to loved this new book by this highly acclaimed author, but it just wasn't my cup of tea. I really can tell you nothing, I know nothing that happened here.

I’ve been reading some really long novels recently so I like to keep a book of short stories to read on the side. I’m very glad I picked up this new collection by Viet Thanh Nguyen despite not having yet read his debut novel “The Sympathizer” which won multiple awards including the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. All of these stories touch upon the Vietnamese immigrant experience in America from different perspectives – frequently with characters forced to leave their native country. Many involve people who were directly affected by the Vietnam War or people who are still affected by it second hand based on the experiences of their parents. Their day to day lives are still weighed down by the recent history and trauma of severing ties with their native land to create a new life for themselves in America. This produces fascinating situations where characters wrestle with finding a cohesive sense of identity based on economic status, nationality, race, sexuality and gender. These exquisite stories are so impressive for being both profound and compulsively readable.

Generational clashes often play an important factor such as the story ‘The Americans’ where a former air force pilot locks horns with his daughter Claire who settles in an entirely different culture. Or in ‘Someone Else Besides You’ a regimental father who vandalizes the car of his son’s ex-wife demonstrates a different form of emotional repression. But these stories also show a tremendously moving fluid sense of identity where people are caught between their Vietnamese and American selves. Nguyen shows this so artfully in his characters that range from a ghost writer, to a peddler in fake merchandise, to a young woman who was given the same name as her older American half sister to a young refugee who is taken in by a gay couple in 1970s San Francisco. Their dramatic situations play out the tension between paths in life laid out for them and ones which they forge on their own.

The economic disparity between nations and levels of society greatly influence the lives of these characters as well. Some characters are determined to compensate for what they were forced to leave behind: “His ambition was to own more books than he could ever possibly read, a desire fuelled by having left behind all his books when they had fled Vietnam.” Stories and story telling between the characters also play an important role. In ‘Black-Eyed Women’ it’s observed that “In a country where possessions counted for everything we had no belongings except our stories.” Part-factual/part-embellished tales of life in Vietnam are passed down through generations. There is a definite divide between the narrative of those who escaped persecution in their homeland and those who remained in oppressed circumstances where dissent requires time in “re-education” camps. The reader is prompted to wonder what is “authentic” about national identity or the lives we live particularly in the story ‘The Transplant’ where compulsive gambler Arthur receives a liver transplant from an Asian man and ‘Fatherland’ where a Vietnamese woman returns to her homeland to visit her father’s second family. How much do nations owe to compensate for the wrongs of wartime, what obligation do countries have to take in those that have been forced to flee their native land and how do you assimilate people caught between two wildly different cultures? These queries subtly raised throughout the stories feel highly pertinent to the broader discussions of many nations.

It’s interesting getting a different perspective of the long lasting effects of the Vietnam War after having read Robert Olen Butler’s novel “Perfume River” last year. This considered the aftermath of the war over generations from a white American perspective. Nguyen shows how some Asian characters living in the United States still feel the war in their day to day lives like in the heartrending story ‘War Years’ where the battle against the Communists is still very personal for an ardent woman struggling with irreconcilable loss. It leads the narrator to note how “while some people are haunted by the dead, others are haunted by the living.” The overall effect of these stories is subtly haunting because the perilous positions and existential dilemmas of the characters feel so emotionally real. Nguyen skilfully plays out the ambiguities of these situations in which no one can ever feel settled or fully at home.

http://www.librarything.com/work/18189665

A beautiful collection of short stories by a talented writer. Every story is full of restraint, quiet tragedy, humanity. The writer leaves so many of his stories open-ended at the end -- in a way that is simultaneously frustrating but also necessary. It speaks to the experience of being a refugee, of not knowing how your story will play out.

The collection of nine stories in The Refugees is exquisite. They all center around Vietnamese refugees in the unites States and some of the difficulties they encounter here. The struggle of refugees is timely, meaningful and heart wrenching. The Refugees is a beautiful and thoughtful collection of stories.