What Hunger
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- € 13,99
Beschrijving uitgever
'Pulses with a simmering rage' Monika Kim, author of The Eyes Are the Best Part
This is not a tale where the girl is running away from danger - instead, she is the danger.
It's the summer before high school and Ronny Nguyen spends her days reading trashy magazines. Standing in contrast is her brother Tommy, the pride of their immigrant parents and destined to be the first in the family to attend college.
Their parents, Mẹ and Ba, rarely speak of their past in Vietnam, except through the language of food. Mealtimes are a tapestry of cultural memory: spring rolls with nem chua and bowls of phở tái with blood-red beef. In the aftermath of the war, Mẹ and Ba taught Ronny and Tommy that meat was a dangerous luxury, a symbol of survival that should never be taken for granted.
But when tragedy strikes, Ronny's world is upended and she is overtaken by a strange force larger than herself. This newfound power comes with an insatiable hunger for flesh, a craving that is both a saving grace and a potential destroyer.
What Hunger is a visceral, emotional journey through the bursts and pitfalls of female rage.
"Whether it took days, or months, or years, I would come for him. And I would savour the moment."
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Dang's incendiary sophomore novel (after Nice Girls), a Midwestern teen grapples with grief and a generational divide with her Vietnamese immigrant parents while discovering an insatiable appetite for raw meat. As the story opens, 14-year-old Veronica "Ronny" Nguyen attends her older brother Tommy's high school graduation, where he's honored as valedictorian. Their parents fete him with a lavish party featuring crisp pork belly and roast duck, but as summer approaches, tension brews between the siblings and their parents ("We were American kids with Vietnamese parents. We were foreigners to them: a spectacle, an experience," Ronny narrates). Tommy chafes under the family's strict rules, and after a bitter argument, he stays out late and is struck by a car and killed. Distraught, Ronny's father finds solace in alcohol; her mother falls into a deep depression and wears the same ratty, brown robe every day; and Ronny feels adrift ("I felt nothing. No nerves, no excitement, no dread"). That fall, she sneaks out to attend a house party with older kids, where she's sexually assaulted and escapes her attacker by biting his ear off, which energizes her. She finds that raw meat quells her melancholy and rage, and takes to eating raw steak from the butcher shop as she fantasizes about killing and eating her assailant. Dang keenly captures her narrator's alienation and anger, and the intergenerational tale concludes with a powerful revelation about the parents' unspoken trauma from the Vietnam War. This one hits hard.
