Chevalier’s Books | Viet Thanh Nguyen in Conversation With Andre Dao
US Launch of Andre Dao’s ANAM: Andre Dao, in conversation with Viet Thanh Nguyen
Join us for the U.S. launch of award-winning Australian Vietnamese author Andre Dao’s novel, ANAM, as part of the ongoing commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the end of the War in Vietnam this year. Dao will be joined in conversation by Pulitzer Prize winning-author Viet Thanh Nguyen.
Described by the Guardian as “a work of unusual power and beauty,” André Dao’s award-winning novel ANAM transforms fragments of childhood memories, audio recordings, government documents and family lore into a moving inquiry into what can and cannot be imagined about another person’s life. The unnamed narrator, a former lawyer who embarks on an academic career at Cambridge University, finds himself increasingly haunted by his grandfather’s stories of having been detained for 10 years as a “prisoner of conscience” in one of Vietnam’s most notorious jails. How to reconcile the small, quiet grandfather he knew with this newly discovered family history? How possible is it to know, much less seek to tell, someone else’s story—especially one marked by multiple displacements and a never-ending war? Dao’s ambitious efforts to find a meaningful and ethical way of acknowledging the unknowability of personal histories in Anam yields a dazzling work of autofiction.
About ANAM:
A grandson tries to learn the family story. But what kind of story is it? Is it a prison memoir, about the grandfather held without charge or trial by a revolutionary government? Is it an oral history of the grandmother left behind to
look after the children? A love story? Or a ghost story – a mystery to be solved?
Moving from 1930s Hanoi through a series of never-ending wars and displacements to Saigon, Paris, Melbourne and Cambridge, Anam is a novel about memory and inheritance, colonialism and belonging, home and exile.
Anam blends fiction and essay, theory and everyday life to imagine that which has been repressed, left out, and forgotten. The grandson mines his family and personal stories to turn over ideas that resonate with all of us around place and home, legacy and expectation, ambition and sacrifice. As he sifts through letters, photographs, government documents and memories, he has his own family to think about: a partner and an infant daughter. Is there a way to remember the past that creates a future for them? Or does coming home always involve a certain amount of forgetting?