RaveThe Asian Review of Books... accomplishes in some 160 pages what has taken many historians volumes to tell ... Thúy achieves this awesome task by crafting a complex whole out of one-to-three page sliver-like chapters, each of which retain a shifting, cinematic focus on the movements of a handful of characters ... With the deft hand of the master craftsman, Thúy weaves the narrative in and out of linearity, allowing each piece of narrative to announce its rightful place in the puzzle ... To those who might object that this sounds a bit too illustrative of historical circumstance, it is to Thúy’s profound gifts as a novelist that she evades this trap by fracturing her narrative midway through the book – as an ironic reflection of the very real fracturings that took place at the war’s end – into a confused morass of stories that gradually and fascinatingly resolve themselves in the book’s final pages ... The prose here is some combination of journalistic conveyance and the condensed mode of storytelling often referred to as \'flash fiction\' ... Formally, Thúy’s work seems ready to be placed next to that of the great North American minimalist writers like Mary Robison and Diane Williams, who similarly manage to pull off an entire range of pathos within the span of a paragraph or two; though it is ultimately Marguerite Duras, who similarly uses the French language as a tool for reconciliation (and, perhaps uncoincidentally, spent her youth in colonial Indochina), who accomplishes a peculiar poetry of unadornment and longing similar to that of Thúy ... What Thúy, whose elegantly economical French is rendered here into a refined and lucid English by renowned Quebecois translator Sheila Fischman, manages to produce is an engrossing narrative that holds its own idiosyncratic style—something that should, after all, be the task of every novel to accomplish, but is seen increasingly rarely.
Kwon Yeo-Son, tr. Janet Hong
RaveAsian Review of BooksAs we move beyond its opening pages, it becomes apparent that Lemon, the first book by South Korean author Kwon Yeo-sun to be translated into English, is anything but genre fiction ... What comes to matter more are not the details of the unsolved case itself, but the psychological after-effects that have afflicted all the surviving characters in the intervening years; their reflections, their experiences of lost innocence, form a delicately woven tapestry of voices grappling with doubt and the meaning of lives lived beneath the cloud of uncertainty ... The monologistic, stream-of-consciousness form...allows for a rhythmical unfurling of details that a more traditional crime novel would have served up as a cold platter early on ... If Lemon has a thesis, it is that after a confrontation with the unthinkable, the psychic turmoil of sense-making requires its own language. Perhaps such a proposal would be less compelling without Kwon’s sparse, lyrical prose (in Janet Hong’s translation), enabling even descriptions of banal occurrences to assume a poetic gravitas ... Lemon fails as an illustration of generic detective fiction. Where it succeeds, however, is as a work of art, which is by necessity a mystery inherently unsolvable.
Yan Ge tr. Jeremy Tiang
PositiveAsian Review of BooksWriting firmly within the fabulist tradition of writers like Italo Calvino, whose Cosmicomics is a clear precursor, Yan is clearly making it up as she goes along. This, however, seems to very much fit Yan’s fabulist project, as her reflections on the craft of writing woven throughout the novel make clear ... Despite some baffling inconsistencies littered throughout as a result of this haphazard practice of invention, it is mostly a joy to go along for the ride. Yan’s real achievement may be her depiction of a contemporary urban China that is clearly recognizable, and that exists side-by-side with a China of the imagination—a place where myth and reality can co-conspire and nurture one another.
