This year I started keeping a personal list called Suggested Readings linked off the main menu of the blog’s homepage (unbeknownst to you email subscribers) where I keep track of books that have been recommended to me and the source of that suggestion. It can come in handy for ready-reference, but there are other proven methods as well, such as this offering from the Angry Algonquin blog.
This is in contrast to thinking that this blog is just a personal recommendation engine to others. The Suggested Readings list illustrates that book recommendations are coming in much faster than I can read them and that regular blog readers -- well, they kind of know what interests me.
Post Gravity’s Rainbow
It was relief to finish Gravity’s Rainbow (See the essay, “A Screaming Comes Across the Sky”) and begin knocking off some smaller fanfare like the short Graham Greene novel, The Ministry of Fear (1943). This suggestion came from a writer friend and subscriber Jim, who encouraged me read this book set in Britain during The Blitz. (Considering that Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) is set in World War II Europe made it seem more timely.) The Greene book had an Alfred Hitchcock feel of humor and intrigue – like another Greene novel, The Third Man, (1949). Set in postwar Vienna I read The Third Man earlier this year and topped it off by watching the film classic based on the novel staring Orson Welles and Joseph Cotton. Thanks, Jim, for encouraging me to look at an author I heard of, but never read.
Nothing Ever Dies
A big shoutout goes to my friend Maggie who suggested that I read Viet Thanh Nguyen’s book of essays, Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (2016). I had already read Nguyen’s book of short stories, The Refugees (2017) and the Pulitzer Prize winning The Sympathizer (2015), which I wrote about here. Nothing Ever Dies dovetails well with these works of fiction and inspired multiple index cards of notetaking. The book is filled with insights into the relationship between war and memory and most specifically with the War in Southeast Asia. (Nguyen argues that referring to it simply as the Vietnam War makes it too American focused and diminishes the deaths of the 400,000 who died in Laos, the 700,000 who perished in Cambodia, which includes the genocide at the hands of the Khmer Rouge and the 3,000,000 civilians and soldiers who died in North and South Vietnam from 1965-1975.)
Nguyen, who was born in Vietnam in 1971, came to the United States as a refugee with his parents after the Fall of Saigon in 1975. He gives us numerous examples of how the war is viewed and remembered from a Southeast Asia perspective. This outlook varies greatly from the United States in terms of books, art, museums, memorials, and motion pictures (e.g. Francis Ford Coppola’s film Apocalypse Now which Nguyen satirizes in The Sympathizers).
Mixed in with his first-person accounts of his trip back to Southeast Asia to research the book, there are black and white photos that he took while visiting museums, cemeteries, and memorials. It gives the book a kind of W.G. Sebald look and feel. One contrasting set of observations are from outside of Ho Ch Minh City ("or what many still prefer to call, for reactionary, sentimental or simply lyrical reasons Saigon,” writes Nguyen). The first description is of the Truong Son Martyrs Cemetery built by the victors and features a towering grieving mother for the martyrs who won the war. Nearby is an almost forgotten South Vietnamese cemetery covered by little more than graffiti-ed gravestones and desecrated tombs. Nguyen deliberates on who controls the narrative of the Southeast Asia war. There are the victors of course, but what about the defeated South Vietnamese who stayed in the country and the South Vietnamese refugees (and the Hmong in Laos) who fled the country? Or is it the defeated superpower who controls the memory of the war?
This is well-written book presents many ideas and deserves a thoughtful reading, which are too numerous to present here. One takeaway is that there is an ethics of remembering. Nguyen writes:
“Regardless of whether those we remember are saintly or all too human, the ethical force of remembering one’s own reinforces the shared identities of family, nation, religion, or race. In the ethics of remembering one’s own, remembering those of one’s side, even when they do terrible things, is better than ignoring them altogether. Nothing is worse than being ignored, erased, or effaced, as the losers of any war or conflict can affirm. In memory wars, a victory is had in simply being remembered and being able to remember, even if one’s self and one’s own appears troubled, tortured or even demonic.”
Another takeaway is that this book begets other recommendations. Maggie asked if I am interested in Monique Truong's The Book of Salt (2003), which Nguyen hails as "the only major work that focuses on the life of a (Vietnamese) peasant."
Oh no, the list never ends.
Photo Credits: The photograph at the top of the posting is from the Hanoi Military History Museum, which includes this sculpture made up of airplane parts from a B-52 bomber. And if you're wondering about the photograph that graces the email, that picture was taken at Last Book Store in downtown Los Angeles in 2017. My longtime partner Denise Casey was the photographer.
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