Immigrant Novel: Nguyen and Novel

immigrant novel: Nguyen's jagged, hostile and at times outrageously funny novel managed to turn the conventions and pieties of the immigrant novel on their head without compromising its lucid moral vision, according to Toronto Star. The Refugees is Nguyen's follow-up, a collection of short fiction that explores a more restrained cast of displaced people than the scheming soldiers, spies and politicians of The Sympathizer. Grove Atlantic By James Grainger Special to the Star Sun., Feb. 19, 2017 Literary award juries are not noted for rewarding bold, innovative fiction, but last year's Pulitzer Prize jury, along with about a half dozen others, got it right when they handed the prize to Viet Thanh Nguyen for his debut novel, The Sympathizer. In each story, characters are dropped into situations of extreme cultural, linguistic, and geographical displacement, forcing them to radically adjust their assumptions about themselves and the world. Nguyen's protagonists negotiate the war's continuing fallout displaced, resilient, often bound strict codes of behaviour and conduct completely out of place in contemporary America and even communist Vietnam. Many of the stories take place in the Vietnamese communities of California, communities created by the fallout of the Vietnam War, a cataclysm ever present though rarely spoken of. (www.immigrantscanada.com). As reported in the news.