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the complete review - fiction

Ru

by
Kim Thúy

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

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Our Assessment:

B+ : beautifully written impressions of the Vietnamese exile/immigrant experience

See our review for fuller assessment.

  Review Consensus:

  All very impressed

  From the Reviews:

• "Kim Thúy hat die Gabe, Dinge klar zu benennen und sie neben Sätze zu stellen, die wie Schattenbilder neben dem Privaten das Allgemeine aufscheinen lassen. (...) Kim Thúy schreibt mit allen Sinnen eine dichte, bildstarke Prosa." - Anja Hirsch, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
  
  
• "I confess I was wary of finding something gauzily poetical: a romance-of-war novel. I was wrong. Our narrator, An Tinh, comes in a spare, almost uninflected voice, neither stark nor embellished, unspooling a retrospective story of a childhood turned nightmare and the beginnings of a new life in Canada. (...) In just 140 pages, the novel touches on an impressive range of culture notes and historical incident, woven through the family’s decades-long arc of prosperity, suffering and piecemeal recovery. (...) The book’s lapses emerge as ones of structure and focus." - Jim Bartley, The Globe and Mail
  
  
• "The accounts of escape and arrival are exciting, but Ru is more about observation and atmosphere (.....) Thúy's impressionistic approach means the book can feel rudderless, but the stories are poetic and powerful." - James Smart, The Guardian
  
  
• "Thuy's sparse style lends itself to such disturbing disclosures. Translated from French, the novel is written as a series of prose poems that alternate with longer passages. Neither is there a classical narrative arc; there is the tracking of parallel lives that intertwine: Canada in the present, Vietnam in the past." - Julie Wheelwright, The Independent
  
  
• "Der Roman besticht durch seine selbstbewusste und eigenwillige Form sowie durch seine leichthändige Annäherung an Dinge, die von grosser Tragik sind. (...) Entstanden ist ein Buch, das jenseits der Chronologie zwischen Zeiten und Orten, Szenen und Figuren hin und her springt, wobei die Brüche das Widerstreben des Innewerdens manifest machen. Traumschwer und bitter-schön sind die Erinnerungsbilder, die von einer lakonisch-klugen Gedanklichkeit umspielt werden." - Andreas Breitenstein, Neue Zürcher Zeitung

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

       Ru is billed as a novel, but consists of short pieces -- only a few are more than a page in length -- describing, in what appears to be no particular order, scenes and impressions from the life of the narrator, Nguyễn An Tịnh -- which, in turn, bear a close resemblance to author Kim Thúy's own experiences, from her birth during the Tet Offensive in 1968 to her fleeing Viet Nam with her family a decade later, and then growing up in Canada.
       The short pieces are beautifully composed, and resonant despite their concision; despite the almost haphazard-seeming presentation, in which the narrator jumps back and forth in time, from her own childhood to when she is a mother, the aggregate makes for a surprisingly cohesive larger whole.
       Thúy effectively conveys experience from a child's point of view, incomprehending about certain aspects of what is happening around her both in Viet Nam and then in the strange new world that is Canada. Often, there is a sense of distance and remove -- from deaths as they flee on the open seas and arrive in Malaysia to the barriers of communication and understanding (on a variety of levels) in Canada. In childhood Nguyễn An Tịnh sees herself simply as the shadow of her closest 'friend' in Canada, for example -- who thirty years later doesn't recognize her voice on the phone "because she had known me as deaf and mute. We had never spoken." Her own autistic son is just another manifestation of remove.
       There are many vivid scenes, perhaps making even more of an impression in Thúy's compressed presentation. The description of a wall dividing a room erected by a mother, who leaves one son with the fan in his half, the other with the switch to turn it on and off in the other half, is hardly an unfamiliar idea, but even something like this is effectively pulled off. There are also more complex, nuanced episodes, such as when she relates that:

The first time I carried a briefcase, the first time I went to a restaurant school for young adults in Hanoi, wearing heels and a straight skirt, the waiter for my table didn't understand why I was speaking Vietnamese with him. At first I thought he couldn't understand my southern accent. At the end of the meal, though, he explained ingenuously that I was too fat to be Vietnamese.
     I translated that remark to my employers, who laugh about it to this day. I understood later that he was talking not about my forty-five kilos but about the American dream that had made mine more substantial, heavier, weightier.

- M.A.Orthofer, 16 October 2012

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Links:

• Vintage Canada publicity page
• Libre Expression publicity page
• Kunstmann publicity page
• nottetempo publicity page
• Excerpt
• Q & A in the Toronto Star

• ANZ LitLovers LitBlog
• The Bookbag
• Chronicle Herald
• CULTurMAG (German)
• Curled Up With a Good Book and a Cup of Tea
• diaCRITICS
• L'Express (French)
• Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (German)
• The Globe and Mail
• The Guardian
• The Independent
• Infected Loser
• Irish Examiner
• Joie de vivre
• Jules' Book Reviews
• KevinfromCanada
• Lire (French)
• literaturkritik.de (German)
• Mon coin lecture (French)
• Mrs. Q Book Addict
• National Post
• Neue Zürcher Zeitung (German)
• NOW
• La Presse (French)
• Quill & Quire
• Reading Matters
• The Record
• Télérama (French)
• The Unexpected Twists and Turns

• Mãn

• See Index of Canadian literature
• See Index of French literature
• See Index of South East Asian literature

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About the Author:

       Canadian author Kim Thúy was born in Viet Nam in 1968.

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© 2012-2022 the complete review

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