Desperate Escape

Dept: Clashing armies, societal upheaval, mass killing, desperate escape and lullabies? I confess I was wary of finding something gauzily poetical: a romance-of-war novel. I was wrong. Our narrator, An Tinh, comes in a spare, almost uninflected voice, neither stark nor embellished, unspooling a retrospective story of a childhood turned nightmare and the beginnings of a new life in Canada, according to Globe and Mail. Thuy eschews modes of reminiscence and emotion in favour of recall and assessment. The prose is softly relentless. Even the crush and fear and stench of the dark boat hold is expressed in a flow of waves the syntactical equivalent of ocean swells. The effect is to reilluminate a familiar dichotomy that we all know and often deny: Peace and war, joy and misery, are as unstoppable and eternal as the ebb and flow of tides. Thus sentences feel spontaneous and untweaked. Fischman s translation shows its sensitivity here. To call the writing lyrical, emphasizing authorial spin, would in fact be misleading and launching the tale is a note on the meaning of ru . In French, it denotes a small stream or a flow of water, blood, tears or almost anything else. In Vietnamese, ru means a lullaby. Through the first years of war, An Tinh and her family managed to hang onto a bourgeois Saigon life, with servants and live-in French and Vietnamese chefs. Then the communist inspectors came, backed by troops. The Nguyen family lost everything but a few diamonds sewn into shirt collars and a small cache of gold, which bought their escape. They boarded a decrepit boat with hundreds of others, their destination a squalid Malaysian refugee camp. (www.immigrantscanada.com). As reported in the news.