Thammavongsa isn’t just gifted at exploring the dynamics of families adjusting to new lives, she’s also an immensely talented writer. Her gift for poetry translates perfectly into fiction; her prose is spare but vivid, with no wasted words, and she has an unusual gift for descriptions that stick with the reader. How to Pronounce Knife is a wonderful fiction debut that proves to be a perfect showcase for Thammavongsa’s skill with language and her abundant compassion. It’s also a reminder of our shared humanity at a time when we need it most.
... impressive ... Thammavongsa’s spare, rigorous stories are preoccupied with themes of alienation and dislocation, her characters burdened by the sense of existing unseen. She sets several stories in the workplace, where noxious hierarchies rooted in race and class reinforce and intensify her characters’ feelings of invisibility ... Thammavongsa’s gift for the gently absurd means the stories never feel dour or predictable, even when their outcomes are by some measure bleak ... It is when the characters’ sense of alienation follows them home, into the private space of the family, that Thammavongsa’s stories most wrench the heart.
... written in a precise and emotionally devastating style ... In unembellished prose, Thammavongsa expertly crafts small moments such as this throughout How to Pronounce Knife. The stories are quiet but shattering—powerful because you can feel how much truth there is in them.
Upending the narrative of immigrants sweeping in to take jobs away from Americans, Thammavongsa highlights how it’s often immigrants who get exploited, their contributions ignored ... Almost every story seems to gear up toward some major summit, only to stop abruptly before the climb fully begins. This gives a sense of loose ends or unresolved finishes. But, as Graham Greene famously wrote, a short story is not so much about a start or an end as about 'that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.' Thammavongsa’s spare, unsentimental writing certainly frames those defining moments meaningfully ... The overall impression, however, is of a collection that aims to educate the white reader about how various inequalities play out for minorities rather than to render fully faceted immigrant experiences.
The writing is bare and unadorned, and the author’s roots as a poet are hardly visible. But the prose works. It’s direct, transparent, and leavened with a sly humor that stems from the reader’s insider knowledge of things that confuse the hapless characters ... Despite its fertile thematic territory and easy style, the collection is uneven. A few of the stories are little more than vignettes that never quite achieve friction or epiphany. The author gets her vitality and tension from writing about the clash of Laotian and western cultures, and the stories that depart from this milieu lose their drive. But at her best—in the title story, and in Randy Travis and Picking Worms—Thammavongsa says vital things about the immigrant experience: how refugees strive to fit in and yet retain cultural traditions; how race is entwined with class; and how family is, in the end, all we have.
In under 200 pages, Canadian poet Thammavongsa showcases 14 spectacular stories in her fiction debut ... Thammavongsa parses her own culturally amalgamated heritage through most of her narratives here, some previously published. The collection opens with the Commonwealth Short Story Prize short-listed title story, a poignant, eyes-wide-open exploration of a young girl’s embarrassed realization of how little her immigrant father seems to know. Other lingering standouts are many...
... beautifully crafted ... These stories have a quiet brilliance in their raw portrayal of the struggle to find meaning in difficult times and to belong in a foreign place. Thammavongsa writes with an elegance that is both brutal and tender, giving her stories and their characters a powerful voice.
In poet Thammavongsa’s...first collection of fiction, privilege is a concrete force, arbitrary and inexorable ... These stories, written in a spare, distant register, twist the heart; Thammavongsa captures in a few well-chosen words how it feels for immigrant children to protect their parents. But occasionally the stories lean on stereotype to make their point—that scornful yellow-haired girl, blue-eyed and freckled, has a mother who wears a black fur coat and heels and drives a 'big shiny black' Volkswagen ... Moving, strange, and occasionally piercing.
Poet Thammavongsa...makes her fiction debut with this sharp and elegant collection that focuses on the hopes, desires, and struggles of Lao immigrants and refugees in an unnamed English-speaking city ... Thammavongsa’s brief stories pack a punch, punctuated by direct prose that’s full of acute observations ... This is a potent collection.
