Staff Reviews

Imagine James Bond jumping into the Vietnamese jungle with the cast from Apocalypse Now, only to be captured and treated like Winston Smith at the end of 1984, and you have Nguyen's Pulitzer Prize winner. Sad while witty, it presents the multitudinous experience of Vietnamese immigrant veterans who fought alongside the U.S. Army during the Vietnam war, people dealt a double-blow of displacement: exiled from their now-communist homeland, and rejected by an America they tried to protect during the war. At once philosophical and visceral, it raises especially relevant questions about politics, party loyalty, and the value and legitimacy of democracy at home and abroad. But it's more than just a revelatory war novel, or a contentious political novel. It's a novel about the deterioration of a mind relentlessly tormented and abused by racism, alcoholism, self-hatred, and the ghosts of its victims. Ultimately it's about the incongruity of being a compassionate, loving individual in a hyper-political world that dehumanizes all of us in service to an alleged greater democratic cause. A cause that, when you try to grab it, or even glimpse it, somehow always seems to slip through your fingers, to vanish at the last minute. A cause that cloaks depravity in sacred flags, leaving in its wake little more than nonsensical rhetoric and the dregs of human slaughterhouses.