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Publisher Description
Mãn has three mothers: the one who gives birth to her in wartime, the nun who plucks her from a vegetable garden, and her beloved Maman, who becomes a spy to survive. Seeking security for her grown daughter, Maman finds Mãn a husband - a lonely Vietnamese restaurateur who lives in Montreal.
Thrown into a new world, Mãn discovers her natural talent as a chef. Gracefully she practices her art, with food as her medium. She creates dishes that are much more than sustenance for the body: they evoke memory and emotion, time and place, and even bring her customers to tears.
Mãn is a mystery - her name means 'perfect fulfillment', yet she and her husband seem to drift along, respectfully and dutifully. But when she encounters a married chef in Paris, everything changes in the instant of a fleeting touch, and Mãn discovers the all-encompassing obsession and ever-present dangers of a love affair.
Full of indelible images of beauty, delicacy and quiet power, Mãn is a novel that begs to be savoured for its language, its sensuousness and its love of life.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Th y, whose debut, Ru, was a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, has written a lyrical and spare second novel. M n, a Vietnam-born woman living in Canada, enters into an arranged marriage at the behest of her mother, who wants someone to care for her daughter when she dies. The unnamed husband, who fled Vietnam as a "boat person," is a Montreal restaurateur and quickly involves M n in the life of his restaurant. She finds friends, including the effervescent Julie, who builds M n a "culinary workshop" for her fusion Vietnamese-Western dishes. It becomes a local institution. After writing a book that takes her to Paris, M n meets Luc, who grew up in his father's orphanage in Vietnam before the fall of Saigon. Luc jolts M n into the possibility of a new way of living, where love is a "precise destination" that can take her away from the "humdrum life" she leads. M n's relationship with Luc is written with tenderness, though any sense of its domestic implications with her husband is conspicuously absent. . No chapter of this slim book spans more than two pages. Every section is annotated with Vietnamese phrases that serve as a thematic introduction, and Th y strings the vignettes together to form a powerful, poetic narrative.
