Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War is reviewed in The New Yorker‘s ‘Briefly Noted’ section.
The winner of this year’s Pulitzer Prize for fiction here examines the cultural memory of the Vietnam War, both in the U.S. and in Asia. In thematically arranged chapters—on remembrance, forgetting, and spectacle—he produces close readings of the novels, films, monuments, and prisons that form “the identity of war” in Vietnam, “a face with carefully drawn features, familiar at a glance to the nation’s people.” Nguyen draws insights from Levinas, Ricoeur, and other philosophers, and his approach has affinities with that of hybridists such as W. G. Sebald and Maggie Nelson. The book is also notable for its inclusivity, addressing Cambodian, Laotian, Hmong, and Korean experiences and the competition for narrative dominance in bookstores and box offices.
