![]() ![]() ![]() This lack of concrete information is far from frustrating, but rather essential to the narrative effect: something allegorical and dreamlike, a story that doesn’t so much declare things about our outside world as reveal, intimately, Calla’s interior one. It does not explain how the world ended up this way - or even where in the world, exactly, the story takes place. A few turns felt rushed, but over all the writing is clear and sharp, with piercing moments of wisdom and insight that drive toward a pitch-perfect ending. This tense plot is nonetheless told with such restraint and subtlety that the one or two heavy-handed moments felt odd, as if they belonged to a different book. Calla herself is the pillar of the story, a compelling figure who balances thoughtfulness with ferocity, and whose growth throughout is more than earned. ![]()
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![]() The novel is rife with insight and criticism - and importantly in America, Nguyen tells Rath, the perspective of a Vietnamese person during and after the war. He now studies ethnicity in America as a professor at the University of Southern California. Nguyen is Vietnamese-American, and was just 4 years old when his family fled South Vietnam in 1975. ![]() That mission takes the Captain to Los Angeles, to the Philippines to participate in the filming of an extravagant Vietnam War movie (sound familiar?), and back to Vietnam itself. The book is written as a confession from the narrator's jail cell, recounting his post-war mission: to flee with the remnants of the South Vietnamese Army to the United States, and continue to spy on them. depending on your point of view," Nguyen tells NPR's Arun Rath) in April 1975. Its publication comes 40 years to the month after the fall of Saigon ("or liberation. So begins Viet Thanh Nguyen's new novel, The Sympathizer. I am simply able to see any issue from both sides. I am not some misunderstood mutant from a comic book or a horror movie, although some have treated me as such. Perhaps not surprisingly, I am also a man of two minds. ![]() I am a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces. ![]() ![]() ![]() I found him to be inspired and I loved his way of communicating with Yael and how protective he was. In the meantime she gradually wins over recluse Aleksei into giving her shelter from the outside world.Īleksei is mute but that didn’t stop me from completely falling for his character. All alone, and with the belief that there is nobody left to wonder where or how she is, Yael’s life is now driven by the hope that her brother Josef is alive and how they could be reunited. ![]() Set around World War II, in The Song of the Stork we meet Yael, a fifteen year old Jewish girl who is on the run, seeking shelter from the Germans. ![]() The prose is dark and intense and my fear for what could happen to the characters I quickly cared for had me refusing to put the book down. Stephan Collishaw’s storytelling was built on atmosphere and tension, the unnerving feeling that something bad is going to happen without it being spelt out to us. The cover is stunning and the title is really striking and the perfect fit for the story inside. The Song of the Stork is the complete package as far as beautiful books go. ![]() ![]() ![]() Such a great novel: Easy to read, easy to connect with the characters and understand things from their POVs. Poignant, well analyzed, realistically written bittersweet story with its well developed, layered middle class New Yorker characters. ![]() It's about the love between women and men, and children and parents about the things we give up in the face of adversity and about how to survive when life turns out differently from what we thought we signed up for. Morningside Heights is a sweeping and compassionate novel about a marriage surviving hardship. Arlo, a wealthy entrepreneur who invests in biotech, may be his father's last, best hope. ![]() Meanwhile, Spence's estranged son from his first marriage has come back into their lives. One day, feeling especially isolated, Pru meets a man, and the possibility of new romance blooms. With their daughter, Sarah, away at medical school, Pru must struggle on her own to care for him. The Great Man can't concentrate he falls asleep reading The New York Review of Books. ![]() Thirty years later, something is wrong with Spence. But when she falls in love with and marries Spence Robin, her hotshot young Shakespeare professor, her life takes a turn she couldn't have anticipated. When Ohio-born Pru Steiner arrives in New York in 1976, she follows in a long tradition of young people determined to take the city by storm. ![]() |