Novels about the immigrant experience aren’t renowned for mirth — too often they are drearily po-faced or blandly sentimental; so Chinatown’s sardonic facetiousness is refreshing.—Houman Barekat, Tribune
Thuân (Đoan Ánh Thuân) was born in 1967 in Hanoi. She studied at universities in Russia and France and now lives in Paris. Chinatown is her twelfth novel. She is a recipient of the Writers’ Union Prize, the highest award in Vietnamese literature.
Translated by Nguyễn An Lý
Novels about the immigrant experience aren’t renowned for mirth — too often they are drearily po-faced or blandly sentimental; so Chinatown’s sardonic facetiousness is refreshing.—Houman Barekat, Tribune
A virtuosic stream-of-consciousness mapping of the afterlives of diaspora.—The New Yorker
Like Duras, Thuận is an intensely poetic writer. She relies so heavily on repetition that Chinatown’s text often seems to have refrains, like a ghazal or villanelle would. In many writers’ hands, this strategy could be deadening, but Thuận excels at creating momentum through language, and Nguyen An Lý translates that momentum beautifully. Chinatown exerts a near-tidal pull on the reader. I swallowed it down in one gulp.—Lily Meyer, NPR
Surprising and brilliant…an astonishing work of sharp wit and profound tragedy that refuses to be flattened into a single representation.—Lamorna Ash, Times Literary Supplement
Chinatown is a breathless work of fiction that whirls through dreams and memory and places like Hanoi, Leningrad, and Paris, where the narrator (a Vietnamese immigrant) lives with her son. The book is drenched with intense longing and it has a Marguerite Durasian nouveau roman, no-nonsense kind of vibe. It made me dizzy and lovesick at once.—Shane Anderson, Spike Magazine
Thuận recreates the rich texture of the past as it exists for those severed from their origins, a layering of memories, historical eras, and personal milestones that shifts and melds.—Alice Stephens, Washington Independent
[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
Thuận, 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, Thuận’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, Thuận 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 (Starred)
