[Read] The Refugees Book
The Refugees by Viet Thanh Nguyen
Read ► The Refugees Book [PDF]
Book Reviews:
I read a lot of books in 2017 about the refugee and/or immigrant experience — What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky, Exit West, Pachinko, The Leavers — and none of them felt as dry as this book. To say this is supposed to be one of the best books of last year, I was disappointed.
Nguyen tries to do with this what Arimah did with What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky, except with Vietnamese immigrants instead of Nigerian. The book contains a number of stories all relating to Vietnam and refugees in various ways, but both books focus instead on the mundane aspects of family life, grief, and sexuality with the refugee/immigrant aspect forming a backdrop.
Unlike Arimah’s work, though, the characters here felt flat and lifeless to me. Where Arimah captured small telling moments between people and infused them with emotion, Nguyen merely narrates a series of events. The combination of everyday mundanities and a cold impersonal narrative made for a very boring book. I was unmoved and just eager to finish.
It’s sad because I know the author is telling an important story from a fresh perspective not explored in the other books I noted about refugees and immigrants, but knowing that the author meant well does not save this from being a forgettable collection.
After a spate of so so books, The Refugees reminded me of what makes me love a work of fiction: excellent writing, creative story telling, and complex human emotions. The Refugees is a slim book of short stories, but it really hit the mark. For the most part, the common thread between the stories is the experience of Vietnamese refugees who have moved to the US.
Many stories focus on complex parent-child dynamics or dynamics within couples. Many characters have memories of the extraordinary lengths their parents went to in order to get them out of Vietnam, and most stories focus on the lives forged in the US. Despite these common themes, the stories are unique — creating a rich range of different characters, situations and emotions. With very few words, characters feel real and complex.
The stories are not uniformly bleak — as was the case in a couple of collections I read recently — but nuanced in their emotional range. There is no standout story — I loved them all. The challenge in reviewing a book I love is that there’s not much to say other than to use a few gushy adjectives. But, trust me, this is sincere gushing! I have not read Nguyen’s Pulitzer Prize winning The Sympathizer, but clearly I need to get a copy.
4.8 stars
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 — and 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.
My very favorite story 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:
I’D LOVE YOU TO WANT ME
I’D LOVE YOU TO WANT ME
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. (Most of the stories did not have a title, just a bold first letter indicating a new story was beginning, so I had to find out story titles by looking at the TOC.) 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-child 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 The Sympathizer. I’ll be checking that one out soon!
(Okay, okay, so I lied: I did 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?)