The Sweetest Fruits by Monique Truong

“Upon hearing ‘Setsu’ released from his lips---an intimacy implied, an affection kindled, a heart so near to mine---I heard my true name for what it had been until then, an afterthought in the lives of men” (244).

    This line from Monique Truong’s The Sweetest Fruits sums up what I view as the central project of Monique Truong’s third novel, which is accomplished for better and for worse. The subject of the novel is Lafcadio Hearn, and it is my own ignorance that I did know until I began this review that he truly was an actual historical figure. As such, I had no idea why I should be invested in this character and Truong is not forthcoming for his details. It’s a testament to her project of giving primacy to overlooked women that she gives, essentially, no in-text reasons for us to feel invested in the supposed genius of Lafcadio Hearn. By the same token, though, it means that I had little investment in the supposed central focus of the book, which maybe undermines some aspect of the goal of the text.

    The novel is a series of accounts from women affiliated with Lafcadio Hearn throughout his life—his mother in Greece and Ireland, his first wife in the United States, and his second wife in Japan. Ultimately, the organizational principle of the novel is via Elizabeth Bisland’s biography of Lafcadio Hearn, excerpts of which are interspersed between the accounts of the other women. Bisland, too, is a real person (who knew!) but I’m not sure if the excerpts are genuine or if fabricated for more dramatic effect.

    Each angle of the book has its own charm. I liked reading about his mother’s conservative upbringing in Greece and her being unable to learn to read or write. I found Alathea’s narrative pretty compelling, since she was a former slave whose ‘voice’ in the novel is quite flowery. I also found it interesting watching the dynamics of their interracial relationship; when Hearn’s newspaper finds out about his marriage he is fired from his job. Ultimately, thought, I failed to feel consistently invested for what I think are two key factors. One, when the sections of a book are so clearly delineated by narrator my brain decides “well, this person isn’t worth getting too invested in—they’ll be gone soon anyhow.” The other factor is that, while the book is focused on women’s experiences, I felt I didn’t get enough of their interactions with Hearn himself to see what made their bond realistically special.

    The sections were not explicitly connected except via the frame narrative and the fact that the human MacGuffin remains. In turn, it felt like not much really ‘happened’ in the book and the lack of progression felt more like an actual biographical account reframed through the personal stories of the women describing the man. It’s valuable to counteract the idea that the women are all “an afterthought in the lives of men” (244), but this particular novel felt a little flat to me.

    This is all the more surprising to me because I absolutely adored (underline, bold, italics) Truong’s debut, The Book of Salt. In many ways, the books are similar. Both focus on periphery figures to the supposed giants. In The Book of Salt, the main character is a gay Vietnamese man in France serving as a cook for Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. Both books have unacknowledged characters serving white writers, but The Book of Salt really capitalized on the petty betrayals and destroyed hopes of its central character while The Sweetest Fruits meanders its way towards the end. 

    Perhaps another reason that I failed to connect with the characters to the same level is, again, because they were so frequently switching, but perhaps too because their identities were more amorphous than one might expect. The Book of Salt had a more narrow timeframe, but when you’re dealing with complete lives it’s hard to make every moment feel meaningful. In addition, one motif in the novel is that of names; most characters are dually or triply named, which adds to some confusion when already trying to keep up with different places, times, and locations is discombobulating. That said, the motif does contribute beautifully to the idea that there are names we know and names we don’t and that when one acknowledges a name authentically it gives the person new life.

    In my post-read research I discovered that Monique Truong has a track record for writing food columns and her love of food is apparent throughout both her novels that I’ve read. The sensuousness with which she describes food is beyond any writer I’ve ever read. I don’t have a complex enough palate to fully appreciate her descriptions of food, but even for a complete food-philistine the words are delicious enough on their own right to be worth savouring. 

    The sensuous passages are intermingled with a sort of reportage style. I appreciated the interview-like tone of the first two accounts since they gave the narrators such a personal touch. The errors, misspeaking, and so on, so common to everyday speech are tastefully and artfully recorded to make the account feel more authentic. While at times dry, the overall tone is effective and Truong is most certainly a thoughtful, measured writer.

    I admit to feeling somewhat disappointed in this book. After The Book of Salt, my expectations were through the roof. I will, though, take some personal accountability for my lacklustre view of The Sweetest Fruits. For one, I split up my reading over nearly a month, which meant my immersion was repeatedly broken. As a result, I was not a very careful reader and did not do this book justice.

    My sincere hope is that I simply read this book at the wrong time. I hope that the day will come when I finish reading everything ever written and I can do some re-reading and find The Sweetest Fruits in a more favourable light.

    Until then, happy reading!

the correct fury of your why is a mountain by kevin andrew heslop

    Please read this in the most positive tone possible: it took me a long time to read this short book. I first started it—twice—right as I was going to bed. The opening poem in kevin andrew heslop’s collection gives a gentle, playful opening and the second is a demanding, extended, beautifully wrought and inventive piece. I knew, I just knew, this was not a before-bed kind of read. This was a book that commanded slow, thoughtful consideration. With that in mind, I restarted my reading. Again.

    the correct fury of your why is a mountain is replete with double and triple readings that are as playful as they are insightful. I’ve already alluded to the opening poem of the collection, presented as a forward, which reads: “a thought, barefoot //// slips ///// along a / painter’s /  tendon, // pools /// at the risk. //// Wrist” (ix). In addition to that auditory echo, heslop’s cheeky love of language is elevated, too, by the placement of the words on the page. It’s hard to replicate the organized chaos of the arrangement, but it takes me back to a special time in life where I was experimenting with form—largely to no purpose—and it’s nice to see heslop capitalizing on the visual side of poetry, particularly when it feels like so few poets (myself included) are making use of the page, truly, like a canvas.

    The second poem, “i cavalloni”, dives into language by exploring the Italian word for high waves; the opening line says it doubles as the word for horses. The rest of the poem builds an incredibly imagistic scene of waves coming in like horses. The use of the word “doubles” in the poem is particularly potent because so many of the lines can be read in secondary ways. Because of the spacing of the words and their lack of punctuation, the emphasis falls in places sometimes unexpectedly. The style forces a second read and the secondary interpretations of lines prove fruitful. I often think great poets teach people how to read them, and “i cavalloni” serves as a perfect primer for the collection; you learn to get used to the spacing and the cadences and the lack of punctuation and the layering that comes through in each piece.

For instance, here’s a sample from “the prettiest the most tangential now”:

makes more             sense                       than the former

               blur of         endeavour as                     the con

--temporary surplus autopilot clusterfuck              edits                                                               a mere         boy (5)

The brokenness of the lines gives a gentle ambiguity that allows for possibility. We could make more sense than the former blur, or we could make more blur of sense. The brokenness of con— and —temporary is also engaging for several reasons. Of course, we recognize “con” as a kind of deception, and to me the line suggests that the contemporary is a con. What makes it more compelling to me is that, usually, hyphens are placed at the end of a line to help signal to the reader that the word continues on the subsequent line. By placing it at the start of a line, heslop accomplishes something I find very interesting; he gives a sense of finality in the line that continues. We expect to end on “the con.” With the hyphen at the start of the line, our reading starts in media res, as it were, with a new thought, a “temporary surplus.” The approach requires a good deal of mental juggling that allows multiple truths to co-exist. Another example is in “actually listening ducks is preferable to the predicated pinprick religion”, “the river   its referred   countenance horizontal gravity ducks  seem to prefer / sidelong pinnacle gymnastics of light on water turning like recall i was won // -dering about the manifested of it  meanwhile this radical white indivi– / dual inclined smallpox folk the western world must have longed for escape” (6). The line “i was won” suggests a completion—a kind of entrancement, a giving over of oneself. The moment is then immediately undermined when the word is revised to wondering. No longer is the speaker of the poem given over to the ducks, but instead the ducks are turned into an object of an interrogation, a mode which is, by necessity, incomplete. Notice also that indivi— / dual gets split up differently. Instead of the hyphen appearing at the start, we are given a sense of continuation. And where do the words continue? As a ‘dual,’ a doubling.

    Look at how much I’ve already written about this book. Now take a moment to appreciate the fact that I’m working through the book chronologically and I’ve made it to page 6.

    heslop’s inventiveness with line breaks and page arrangement is only one element of his work, though I do think it contributes to his creative and political project as a whole. There is a resistance to some concerning trends of modern life, including the extremes that arise when people fail to take time to think slowly and carefully.

    One poem, “oh that’s the universe in absolutely radically caps lock accordance with forever” (9), heslop addresses “the masked static of our time” and considers “the question of the edge is of precise diptych / of whether remote chaos without     order    is    possible” (9). The poem continues entrancingly, where “the discrete infinities of language bubbles” are “suspending in sanitizing gel.” Subsequently, “we are / disordered and  ordered  the   crystalline     kin        we    are   just    now as one // community without impulse to you  me my your us  them viral binaries thin— / king English distinction requires  as a syntax of sunlight in italics on the river” (9). heslop works on multiple levels simultaneously, but we also see in this poem a resistance to “viral binaries” — I read the word “viral” in its sickly sense here — and the addition of the word “thin” there shows just how little binaries can be taken seriously. The erosion of distinctions between you, me, my, your, us, them seems to be an impulse here, and what better way to generate political change than with some gorgeous imagery like “a syntax of sunlight in italics” (9). Just fantastic. Actually, in “all the wrong ghosts live here” there’s another beautiful image the draws on text feature imagery: “Bumper cars like ampersands guided by chance / and circumstance in a threadbare ballet” (41). Holy moly what an image. Sliding back over to “oh that’s the universe in absolutely radically caps lock accordance with forever,” the whole poem is great, but I worry that if I cite too much I’ll just overwhelm everyone. I’ll take that risk: “disorienting  grammar      like      love    consciously    trans / —piring the masked   infinities   we    are   can         will      go on forever here” (9). I love the way the poem weaves together issues of identity and language in a non-didactic way, illuminating the issues with wonderful turns of phrase: “you can’t take the edge off a sphere” (9). 

    The poems I’ve cited until now are among the more strange and challenging pieces. That said, heslop shows some great range. Several of the poems are more direct in their formatting, whilst still being compelling. There’s a wonderful, short, piece called “in lieu” that has a lovely sentimentality that balances the more political / socially conscious bent of some of the other poems:

A truth is we hold memories too meaningful

to punish with the anecdotal telling of translation

Into brittle words, as equally there are some memories

too scared for review: the ilk of faces they contain,

held wrapped in neural silk, suspend above the storm

of harms the world can be, like a perfect eyelash

on a sleeping baby’s cheek, untouchable

because of that concern that sleep would not return

after a wakening—so sleep, a little, memory: sleep. (24)

The gentleness of the poem is a refreshing ‘reset’ in partway through the collection. While it still references some issues of language and translation, some of the tender imagery really elevates the piece. The idea of being “wrapped in neural silk” is lovely and the apostrophe addressing sleep in the final lines is a delight.

    In addition to the political and sentimental, there are some aphoristic pieces, some poems in inspired by other poets and some more personal-sounding pieces. In “about the twice-bent blast of that good night”, heslop presents a poem in two parts that is a blend of texting between two characters and a meditation on language and the way heslop mixes the parts together gives the poem a wonderful sequence. The closest analog I can identify is with John Ashbery, whose poems similarly hold a mix of different elements woven together like an intricate handmade basket. I couldn’t possibly do the poem its justice except by rewriting it all here, as I’ve done for my private notebook, but there’s a lovely call-and-response between the first and second part of the poem. In the first part, “That night, / abacus was from the Hebrew word for dust; // calculus, a pebble, from the Latin” (21). There’s then a throwaway mundanity question, the second part starts, and there’s a gut punch: “Grief is a time zone without a calendar. / ‘But define dust’” (22). I love the parallels and mirroring between the two parts and within them. I also like the line “Acrylic / runs from every dog’s mouth on every side / —walk in every city in the world and hear, / brother, in every endless tongue, in every style // of union or revilement, the text of the world: / Fuck” (22). Notice again the breakdown of side-walk. It ends the dog image and then starts an imperative to act, to walk in every city. The poem operates as a kind of spiral and it’s a pretty incredible ode to English speakers’ favourite profanity.

    Really, I can’t rave enough about the imagery of the collection. The poem “back in town” paints such a vivid picture that, again, I could only do justice to by quoting the poem in its entirety. It’s a beautiful ride on the bus. heslop paints the scene beautifully and then gives it that perfect personal touch, that tiny hint of narrative: “With that sentence, / I hoped to tell you how I felt—of particular relevance / is the first line break. Also the distances” (30). After 13 lines of poetry, the personal address is jarring. There’s something about the poem that reads like a prolonged sonnet. A lot of the lines are a syllable too long, and the whole poem is about three lines too long. Both elements combined feel like a lingering longing, a prolonged desire. It’s a poem I’d love to delve into with some of my students—I think they’d really be able to provide some excellent insight. Similarly, “Astoria” offers a personal touch that feels so vulnerable and authentic to be irresistible.

    The creativity of the collection doesn’t even end with the poems. I’ve never seen an acknowledgements section like heslop’s. heslop provides a poem that stretches over several pages in bursts of one or two lines. The poem’s lines are provided with footnotes. In the footnotes heslop thanks a number of his loved ones and influences. I loved that inventive approach to elevate a humdrum “thank you”s section to a creative act in its own right. Incidentally, I don’t think I’ve ever seen an acknowledgements section that thanks so many people that are personally known to me and so many places I’ve been. I hope my experiential overlap with heslop will allow us to one day come into closer contact and talk poetry.

    On that note, there’s a poem in the collection called “observing how you went a few steps at a time to parchment” that has an epigrammatic inscription: “a found poem in four acts for the disabled poem-making entity known as Roxanna Bennett which bears this very went-to-school smart person subtitle you are reading now” (17). As an aside, I absolutely adore Roxanna Bennett’s work, as well, so this meeting of the minds seems, to me, fortuitous and for them outright inspiring. In that poem, there’s a line that reads as follows: “to decide whether ot not / the organization of hope / is poetry” (17) and I quite like that formulation. The idea that poetry gives shape to a particular kind of experience is a worthwhile exploration. I like, too, that “organization” could be used as a noun here in multiple ways. It could read as either Institutional or, as I prefer, the conscious, craft-like act of putting things in place.

    If poetry is the organization of hope, I see a tremendous hopefulness roaming through the correct fury of your why is a mountain. The collection is so wonderfully constructed and embodies a particular kind of ethos, a slow thoughtfulness that serves as both a personal and political imperative. The medium, as the adage goes, is the message here. Everything heslop does seems purposeful while not being limited to a particular interpretation, and I really value that.

    As I mentioned, it took me a long time to read this book, despite it being relatively short. Luckily, it took me a while to read for all of the right reasons and it was a blessing to feel time expand before me while I mulled over the turns of phrase, images, and implications of these poems. This is one of the best, most interesting poetry collections I’ve read in a long while. While it may be hard to adjust to heslop’s style, once you’re immersed you are bound to linger in these lines and it’s worth every minute of it.

    Happy reading!

The Sorrow of War by Bảo Ninh

    Bảo Ninh’s The Sorrow of War is a destabilizing experience and Ninh knows exactly what he’s doing.

    The Sorrow of War is a novel and maybe-memoir that focuses on Kien, a young man bound up in the Vietnam war. The novel begins, though, in 1976, where Kien works in a troop trying to find the bodies of MIA soldiers from the war. What’s most striking is that the novel opens with such rich, beautiful imagery: it’s at a complete disconnect from the content of the story. The death and darkness is, by contrast, overshadowed by lush images of Vietnam.

    There’s a note I should have written down, but I failed to be a good reader. Essentially, after about thirty pages Ninh narrates how Kien is writing a novel that is characterized (read this in italics) exactly as what you’ve just read. He describes the violence and death as being at a disconnect from the imagery as I just have. It’s a profoundly self-reflective moment where Ninh shows that he knows exactly what he’s up to as a writer.

    What makes the moment so incredible, though, is that the metafictional aspect of the book serves the thematic interests of The Sorrow of War beautifully, giving the book a cohesive quality beyond its disorderly approach. When I consider the wave of metafictional writing that took hold in the postmodern period, a lot of it seems to be commentary on truth and writing itself, and often ends there. At its worst, metafiction is a wink and a nudge to how clever the author is.

    There are, of course, exceptions that are truly stunning, and with that in mind I’d like to draw an unlikely comparison. The work of Samuel Beckett often has a metafictional quality where the storytelling is so disrupted yet speaks beautifully to subjecthood. In a posthumanist lens, the narration of Beckett’s works points to the inconsistencies, the incompleteness, and the potentialities for human existence. Here, Ninh does something similar that is well worth a closer inspection.

    The Sorrow of War, in the first place, is a blur of memoir and novel. One would assume that Ninh is the main character, yet the truthfulness and subjecthood of the central figure is immediately questionable because the character’s name is Kien. Moreover, Kien is (presumably) writing a novel about his experiences, and once again the truth of his experience is called into question. It is consistently referred to as a novel rather than a memoir, which implies a layer of fiction, and then the narration of Ninh’s book is repeatedly, repeatedly interrupted to comment on Kien’s novel. So, the book you’re reading is commenting on the book Kien is writing, which comments on the book you’re reading. It has a circularity which challenges your own sense of stability, similar to the way Kien’s characters experience the Vietnam war.

    Ninh’s book reads as a series of vaguely connected episodes. There will be stories of a troop playing cards and then being unceremoniously killed. There are stories of amorous affairs that dissipate into a mist of contradictions. The story works, in some ways, backwards, and the climax of the story is Kien being enlisted in the war. The novel explores the disruptions to the experience of time and forces the reader into that experience by playing scenes out of order and making it impossible for scenes to exist simultaneously.

    Related to the disruption of subjecthood and the nonlinearity of the story, Kien recounts his interactions with Phuong, a young love. Partway through the novel, following the return from war, it appears that Kien and Phuong are neighbours. It suggests that they love one another, and yet Phuong appears to be ‘unworthy’ of him (it’s implied she’s a sex worker) and then she seemingly transforms into a different woman, a mute woman. Meanwhile, Kien seems to be disassociated from his identity and becomes ‘the author.’ There’s a surreal quality that reflects what I assume is post-traumatic stress disorder and lack of cohesion in memory. When Kien finishes writing his book, he presents it to the mute woman. She notes that it’s all out of order and he himself acknowledges that “the novel was the ash from this exorcism of devils” (109). 

    As I’ve mentioned, the novel is largely a commentary on time, as well. Aside from being presented out of logical sequence, there are several moments where characters comment on the way the Vietnam war disrupted time and how they are no longer connected to time as it was. In one scene, Kien narrates: “The future lied to us, long ago in the past. There is no new life, no new era, nor is it hope for a beautiful future that now drives me on, but rather the opposite. The hope is contained in the beautiful pre-war past.” The idea of the future reaching into the past is worth exploring, as is the death and impossibility of the future [c.f. the work of Mark Fisher—the erasure of the future is a motif explored in a different but analogous context]. The idea of hope only existing in the past is also a surprising turn, since hope is nearly by definition a future-reaching sentiment. Elsewhere, Phuong recognizes a similar experience. After some traumatic events (I’ll tell you later, I’m following the out-of-order approach), Phuong tells Kien: “You go your way, I’ll go mine. We had such a beautiful life. You and me, my love for you, your love for me. My mother and your dad, and I would have been your wife, no doubt. That was in the past. Now we have a new future, a new fate. We had no choice in the new circumstances, it was an unlucky coincidence. Now I’m like this, you go your way, I’ll go mine” (212). She comments on the impossibility of their future, but what I find most engaging in the passage is how Ninh uses verb tenses. She begins by referring to the past: “We had such a beautiful life.” She then goes through a series of sentence fragments with no verb tenses before switching to the conditional statement “I would have been your wife.” She places that conditional, though, “in the past.” There’s something about the conditional being relegated to the past that I find so compelling, as if there’s an even greater distance between the potential and the actual. Not only is the future only what could have been, but the future is a possibility withdrawn so far into the past it is doubly impossible.

    The shift in time, again, is self-reflexive: “At first I tried to rearrange the manuscript pages into chronological order, to make the manuscript read like the sort of book I was familiar with. But it was useless. There was no chronological order at all. Any page seemed like the first, any page could have been the last. Even if the manuscript had been numbered, even if no pages had been burned, or moth-eaten, or withheld by the author, if by chance they were all there, this novel would still be a work created by turbulent, even manic inspirations [...] The flow of the story continually changed. From beginning to end the novel consisted of blocks of images. A certain cluster of events, then disruptions, some event wiped off the page as if it had fallen into a hole in time” (223).

    The novel is rightly described as occurring in blocks. In that respect, it’s sometimes difficult to latch onto and feel invested. Characters will be introduced only to be slaughtered, or characters will shift in a way where suddenly you’re unclear on who is who and where is where.

    That said, there were pockets where I felt myself truly compelled and enthralled in the action of the story. One scene that comes to mind is when Kien is leading a troop and looks the other way when they withdraw nightly for amorous trysts, despite it being against the rules. The women disappear and then the troop seeks revenge against the Americans that presumably raped and murdered the women. There’s a scene where the Americans have been ordered to dig their own graves and they plead for their lives. The tension in the moment is so tightly wrought that it’s hard to deny its force.

    Even more impeccable is the climax of the novel, which is a longer stretch that is just stunning. The fact that the climax of the novel is actually chronologically one of the earliest events is interesting in its own right: the past has retained its force. Kien has been called to war and we know from what happens ‘later’ (but earlier in the book) that there are harsh punishments against perceived or actual deserters. Phuong and Kien want to have one last night together before going to war and the whole sequence is rife with sorrow. Essentially, there’s an air raid warning so they have to hide, which means Kien misses his train, and they’re panicked that he’ll be imprisoned or killed for not showing up for service. So, the two try to race against time (and the train) in order to get Kien to his destination on time. It has the intensity and the fog of war effect that I loved so much about the climax of Kazuo Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans. Kien and Phuong end up stealing a bicycle and there’s a carefree childishness bound up with the emotional complexity of leaving for war. They then end up on a train and the train gets bombed, Phuong is raped by a group of Vietnamese men (maybe), and Kien tries to find her after they are separated. The scene flashes forward and backwards by years and more information is revealed that makes the entire scene questionable. The bond between the characters is tragic and beautiful and the scene is so bittersweet; their shared mission to get Kien to war is exhilarating and yet it’s strange for them to race towards an event that you know produces their sorrow and doom and so on. It’s a pretty incredible ending stretch to the story, giving backstory that alters your perception of the events that follow chronologically.

    Kien and Phuong are rich characters, but beyond that the characters often read as somewhat flat. I think it’s largely purposeful. In one scene, Kien reflects on his father’s career as an artist, which is interesting in its own right because his style is at a disconnect with the political climate of the time. In his father’s paintings, “human beings wore dismal expressions, their faces were long and drawn, their bodies stretched. The colours were strange, too. The paintings were utterly depressing, the subjects moronic. [...] with no exception they were all done in varying tones of yellow. Yellow. No other colours, just yellow. [...] the characters wandered aimlessly across unreal landscapes, like withered puppets joined to each other like cut-out figures” (121). I’m tempted to read the novel in terms of the artist’s vision. The human beings in the novel are all pretty dismal and could be interchangeable in the same way that the figures in the painting are all done in the same style. Describing the characters “like withered puppets joined to each other like cut-out figures” I think is an equally appropriate descriptor.

    The book itself is pretty punishing. It’s full of sorrow. It’s full of death. It’s full of pain. The whole text reads as, basically, one block of text. There are paragraph breaks but there are no chapter breaks or clear delineation between sections. As a result, it feels like relentless blocks of text. It really emulates the sensation of an endless, ongoing war.

    Ultimately, The Sorrow of War is a crushing novel / memoir. In many respects it’s compelling, if not actually -pleasurable-. What Ninh does with narrative and seeing his twist on metafictional tropes is surprising and warrants further study. The book subverts expectations around memory, time, and identity in ways that I’ve rarely seen replicated elsewhere. The historical milieu is engaging to me—I’ve been fascinated by the Vietnam war since a high school politics teacher used it as the foundation for our course and I’m often drawn to literature that speaks to that time (I highly recommend em by Kim Thúy). From a story standpoint, some points hit and some points don’t—I’m sure it will be a matter of personal preference what resonates. Because the book makes itself hard to latch onto and because of the dark subject matter, I can’t say it’s the most enjoyable book I’ve read, but it is one that will leave me thinking. 

    Happy reading!