Exiled from Vietnam never to return, a grandfather boards a plane bound for Paris. Restarting his life after a 10-year stint in Chi Hoa prison, he echoes Dickens as he scribbles “Recalled to life!” André Dao’s debut novel Anam does exactly that: it recalls his grandfather’s life, piecing together government documents, photographs, letters and memories.
Their family immigrant story moves from war-torn Vietnam to Melbourne, Paris and Cambridge. Admirable in its scope, Anam weaves together theory, fiction and essay. So, to speak of this book is to speak of its uncategorisable nature; not quite a novel nor a historical text, it exists in the fault lines of its own design.
The protagonist, a human rights lawyer studying at Cambridge University, undertakes the gargantuan task of making sense of his family’s past. Dao’s passion for exploring and amplifying Vietnamese history shines through. At times, the story slips between the reader’s fingers as the historical chapters become overwrought with detail. I found myself feeling like I was studying for an exam, scanning the pages to garner which elements are pertinent to the larger narrative arc. Elsewhere, the novel details the intricacies of academia, from PhD supervision conversations to philosophical theory. I’m sorry to report that academia is boring in real life, never mind reading about it second-hand. These elements are a speed bump in the reading experience, making it hard for the reader to move through the narrative.
With that being said, there is much to enjoy in Anam: the writing of the diaspora experience is carefully rendered throughout. Dao employs a tenderness in writing the loneliness of the diaspora, as the reckoning with Vietnam’s violent colonial past leaves the grandfather unable to speak for a year. Reading this, I recognised much of the Irish experience in the north, that of “saying nothing” of the trauma experienced during the Troubles conflict. These hidden pains of war echo from Vietnam to Ireland, as Dao describes his grandfather’s “memories return[ing] unbidden in the middle of the night, or the middle of a conversation”. When presented without the clutter of over-writing, Anam’s building blocks at their base level are raw testimony, evidence, memories which come together for a universal experience of loss and belonging.
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Aimée Walsh is a writer from Belfast. Her debut novel Exile is forthcoming in spring 2024
