An artfully intertwined medley of Nguyen's essays, lectures and interviews, A Man of Two Faces...is an innovative expose of the racism that shackles refugee populations of color to harmful stereotypes ... Not everything in the book is dire and grim ... A provocative and dynamic family portrait of America's immigrants, shining a light on the humanity too few of us see.
It’s a lot of terrain to cover, and the stretches of impersonal polemic are just that — so unspecific they risk banality ... Revelations offer little we don’t already know ... If Nguyen intended this as a memoir not so much of what happened as of how it felt, it turns out that in the past decade he has felt a lot of the same things the rest of America has, too ... Nguyen never acknowledges the possibility that even within this book, he dilutes the pain of personal experience: Those passages of well-worn social observation can feel like a retreat from self-examination into the safer distance of generality.
Formally audacious ... Forsaking a traditional prose format for discrete paragraph-length chunks of text set apart with line breaks, Nguyen occasionally aligns alternating paragraphs left and right to mimic a dialogue between opposing voices ... Sharp and affecting, this book is both: a weapon, a lamentation.
Constant vigilance helps Nguyen develop a critical distance when assessing his refugee history against a multivalent context ... Even his parents, who lost both home and land by leaving, are not exempt from Nguyen's penetrating gaze ... Taken together, Nguyen's novels, critical essays, and short fiction paint a dynamic, multifaceted portrait of the author.
Many-faceted, stylistically complex, eviscerating, and tender montage of memoir, facts, dissent, and clarification ... A uniquely intricate, clarion, and far-reaching inquiry into what we disparage and what we value, asserting the bedrock necessity of history, story, and remembrance.
Nguyen blazes a nonlinear, literary way through the histories of Vietnam and the US, his parents’ arduous lives in each and his own struggles to find his voice as citizen, son and writer.
Kaleidoscopic ... Readers seeking the anchor of narrative will be frustrated, but Nguyen indisputably captures the workings of a quicksilver and penetrating mind. The author includes a selection of black-and-white photos. A fragmentary reflection on the refugee experience, at once lyrical and biting, by one of our leading writers.
