Operation Frequent Wind ... thirty-one volunteer pilots could save 978 Americans and 1,220 Vietnamese and other nationalities from the American embassy alone. Among the evacuees, one teenaged girl became a biotechnology researcher in Georgia, a young man built a career as an anaesthetist in California, and another made a fortune on fish in Texas.
Beautiful, minimal black and white illustrations on the first few pages of Em.
Some authors write books I never want to shut up about. Others write books that carry me along so thoroughly I never want to discuss my response. I only want to tell others to read them so they can experience the sensation too, with as little outside input as possible.
Kim Thúy‘s like that. You should read her. She‘s worth it.
(I‘m sure she‘s also infinitely discussable, if she hits you that way.)
I came across a favorite author‘s book today in the bookstore. I always seem to find her books almost accidentally. While I‘m 💯 focused on a mad-hunt for something else, she finds me. We cross paths. Maybe serendipitously…I could call it that because I consider it a favorable encounter. You see, I took her to heart with the first book that I read by her many years ago.👇🏽
pickI saw this on the Giller Prize longlist and decided to give it a try - it is a fragmentary portrayal of some of the events near the end of the Vietnamese-American war from the perspective of children who are displaced in the process. There were beautiful turns of phrase but if you weren't already pretty familiar with those events it might have been difficult to read, not sure. I liked the author and will try the next book they write!
pickThe forward movement from character to character, chapter to chapter, would be dizzying if not for Kim Thúy‘s spare prose that clearly shows the links, establishing order amidst the chaos of the war in Vietnam. True events, especially the My Lai massacre & Operation Babylift—are central to the story. I wept. Love is the antidote to trauma & this novel is full to the brim with love. A balm for the heart. Impeccable #translation by Sheila Fischman.
If I knew how to end a conversation, if I could distinguish true truths, personal truths from instinctive truths, I would have disentangled the threads for you before tying them up or arranging them so that the story of this book would be clear between us.
During her visit to a camp in 1975, Tippi Hedren, actress in the Alfred Hitchcock film The Birds, received compliments from the Vietnamese refugees for her impeccable fingernails, which gave her the idea of organizing a manicure class for 20 or so women. Her first students, new Californians, passed their knowledge on to 60 more, who themselves trained other manicurists & so they multiplied, becoming 360, 3060 & more.
Upon arrival at their destination, the coolies worked as hard as beasts on sugar cane plantations, down in mines, building railroads, often dying before the end of their 5-year contract without having received their promised & longed-for salary. Companies involved in the trade assumed beforehand that 20, 30, or 40 percent of the “lots” would perish in the course of the voyage at sea.
During the Franco-Prussian War in 1870 and the following year, the rate of infections contracted sexually by the troops grew from less than four percent to more than seventy-five percent, which later led, during the First World War, to the German government‘s giving high priority to the production of condoms to protect its soldiers, even though there was a serious shortage of rubber.
Instead of an epigraph, this novel opens with a sweet author‘s note about the title.
Picked up two newly published novels today for my Giller longlist reading. These two, plus two more, are yet to be read before the shortlist is announced on October 5… I must read harder! #shadowgiller2021
Original and immersive, I loved this narrative of the Vietnamese street urchin who nurtures the foundling. This short novel is strung together in a series of intense vignettes, and the reader is thrust into the lives of an interconnected cast of people to reveal how their lives have been decimated by the vagaries of war.
Em: A Novel | 
