To Save and to Destroy
Writing as an Other
-
- $26.99
Publisher Description
From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Sympathizer (now an HBO series) comes a moving and unflinchingly personal meditation on the literary forms of otherness and a bold call for expansive political solidarity.
Born in war-ravaged Vietnam, Viet Nguyen arrived in the United States as a child refugee in 1975. The Nguyen family would soon move to San Jose, California, where the author grew up, attending UC Berkeley in the aftermath of the shocking murder of Vincent Chin, which shaped the political sensibilities of a new generation of Asian Americans.
The essays here, delivered originally as the prestigious Norton Lectures, proffer a new answer to a classic literary question: What does the outsider mean to literary writing? Over the course of six captivating and moving chapters, Nguyen explores the idea of being an outsider through lenses that are, by turns, literary, historical, political, and familial.
Each piece moves between writers who influenced Nguyen’s craft and weaves in the haunting story of his late mother’s mental illness. Nguyen unfolds the novels and nonfiction of Herman Melville, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ralph Ellison, William Carlos Williams, and Maxine Hong Kingston, until aesthetic theories give way to pressing concerns raised by war and politics. What is a writer’s responsibility in a time of violence? Should we celebrate fiction that gives voice to the voiceless—or do we confront the forces that render millions voiceless in the first place? What are the burdens and pleasures of the “minor” writer in any society? Unsatisfied with the modest inclusion accorded to “model minorities” such as Asian Americans, Nguyen sets the agenda for a more radical and disquieting solidarity with those whose lives have been devastated by imperialism and forever wars.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This trenchant compendium of lectures by Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist Nguyen (A Man of Two Faces) expounds on "what it means to write and read from the position of an other." The opening selection argues that writers from marginalized backgrounds face "three major temptations": sentimentalizing characters from one's group as saints or victims, presenting oneself as different from other people of the same background, and viewing one's marginalized status as an identity. The path to liberation, according to Nguyen, lies in recognizing that marginalized groups have a shared interest in combating their oppressors. In "On Palestine and Asia," he suggests that as the American-born descendants of East Asian immigrants fought to be recognized as fully American, they lost sight of the bond—born of oppression—they shared with residents of Middle Eastern countries also once exoticized as part of the "Orient," resulting in a dispiriting lack of solidarity with Palestine. Nguyen seamlessly weaves together personal reflections and literary analysis, as when he discusses his parents' journeys from North to South Vietnam, then on to the U.S. to illuminate how Jhumpa Lahiri's fiction depicts "the immigrant as intrepid traveler." The entries are consistently thought-provoking and cogently argued. This will leave readers with plenty to chew on.
