The Refugees
Viet Thanh Nguyen
Grove Press
Viet Thanh Nguyen’s impressive first novel, The Sympathizer, won him international acclaim and a Pulitzer Prize when it was published last year. But those expecting an offering similar in tone from this new story collection will be surprised. Far from the arch swagger and intellectual pretensions of The Sympathizer’s narrative voice, The Refugees is a much quieter affair. The former is a novel of ideas and ideology – ambitious, sprawling, and at times overwritten. The latter, in its relative simplicity, is a more sustained work overall, and packs a more compelling emotional punch.
In this collection, Nguyen steers away from the violence of the Vietnam war, for the most part: his refugees do not want to talk about the trauma they have lived, nor about the journey they have undertaken. These displaced characters are concerned with a longer, less dramatic undertaking – that of constructing daily civilian life in a country both theirs and not theirs. Once the immediate physical danger is removed, the emotional ramifications of displacement and what they, or their parents, lived through begin to resonate.
Interpersonal relationships are a prevalent theme. The protagonists of ‘Black Eyed Woman’ and ‘Fatherland’ are haunted by their siblings – albeit in very different ways – across seas and the span of many years. ‘Black Eyed Woman’ tells of a woman who has tried to forget her brother’s death, only to be visited by his ghost, who spent two decades swimming across the Pacific and arrives in America dripping wet. ‘Fatherland’ is the story of a man who gives the children of the second family he begins in Vietnam the same names as the children he had who fled to America. Rather, it is the story of the charged encounter between the two daughters who share a name and a father, but not a world. There is subtlety and tenderness in these stories, paired with humour and a pervasive sense of humanity that makes this book, dedicated to ‘all refugees, everywhere’, a very necessary one, now perhaps more than ever.
Words – Liza Cox
