Review by Booklist Review
In the first of six essays adapted from his series of them (all also available on YouTube), the much-awarded Nguyen admits he had to "look up Charles Eliot Norton and the Norton Lectures" upon receiving the hallowed invitation to deliver them. He worried that Harvard had erred, fearing a(nother) case of mistaken identity, given his "rather common" name; he had almost lost his Berkeley PhD acceptance because of a different Viet Nguyen. He agreed, of course, because of the challenge ("which a good student never turns down"), the prestige ("which a model minority is always seduced by"), and the money ("Crass . . . but money is often an absent presence"). For loyal devotees, this erudite, crystalline collection might act as both companion to and distillation of Nguyen's previous titles, Nothing Ever Dies (2016) and A Man of Two Faces (2023); Nguyen refers to it as "a sequel [to Two Faces] where I continue working through some preoccupations around writing and otherness." Throughout each lecture, he affectingly weaves his Vietnamese refugee family history and his expansive literary command of the works of dead white men and more empathic "at the moment" writers in order to consider and confront (in)authenticity, being other(ed), Israel's war on Palestine, being "minor," and finding joy in otherness.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
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. (Apr.)
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Review by Library Journal Review
This volume collects lectures that novelist and scholar Nguyen (American studies and English, Univ. of Southern California; The Sympathizer) delivered for Harvard University's 2023--24 Norton Lecture Series. Each lecture focuses on the paradox, opportunity, and challenge inherent in writing from the perspective of the other. "The other" is interpreted broadly here as an immigrant or a member of an ethnic minority or a colonized people, but Nguyen also examines otherness at the level of personal talents, interests, and compulsions. Nguyen draws from his own experiences growing up in the U.S. as the child of Vietnamese refugees, as well as from the writing of others, to articulate the challenges faced by writers who balance exploring the particular experiences and stories of the other with the need not to be reduced, either internally or externally, to a particular ethnic or social identity. Nguyen grapples with the legacy of generational trauma as well as with the ethical questions that arise when writing about family, memory, and the impact of cultural and political change. VERDICT An essential addition for collections about the process and theory of writing, authors of diverse backgrounds, and particularly the experiences of Asian Americans, immigrants, and refugees in the United States.--Rebecca Brody
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
A noted novelist and essayist writes of his life as an "other." In this contribution to the noted Harvard lecture series, Nguyen--best known for his novelThe Sympathizer--writes of the contradictions that come with being an immigrant who has not just mastered the English language but also worked his way through the corpus of English literature and teaches it at a top-tier university. Some of these contradictions are subtle, some even humorous, as when he finds his books, in a Paris bookstore, shelved under "Anglo-Saxon Literature." As an Asian American and, as Nguyen notes, often the only one in the room, he still finds himself pulling away from the label "minority": "I am not a minority if I think of myself as being part of a world, a globe, where white people are the minority. I am also not a minority if, when I am writing, I write first of all to myself, -because I contain multitudes." So, too, do his lectures contain multitudinous voices, with quotations from writers who have stood in a critical relationship with the dominant society: Aimé Césaire, Alice Walker, Derek Walcott, Edward Said. As an other, Nguyen rejects being a standard-bearer for the "voiceless," citing Arundhati Roy's observation that the voiceless are really "only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard." For all that, he declares, he stands among "the Vietnamese, the Asian, the minoritized, the racialized, the colonized, the hybrid, the hyphenated, the refugee, the displaced, the artist, the writer, the smart ass, the bastard, the sympathizer, and the committed---all- those out of step, out of tune, out of focus, even to themselves"--and who have in his stories an able interpreter. A provocative exploration of the writer as storyteller, anthropologist, and knowing outsider. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
