Chinatown [Paperback]

An exquisite and intense journey through the labyrinths of Hanoi, Leningrad, and Paristhrough dreams, memory, and loss Thu?n, in her English-language debut, delivers a powerful examination of a womans remembering and forgetting....Comprised of a single, breathless paragraph interrupted only by the occasional excerpt from [A] delightfully prickly and defiantly inscrutable act of resistance: against simple narratives, against our aversion to what we dont understand, and against anything soullessly practical. A virtuosic stream-of-consciousness mapping of the afterlives of diaspora. Like Duras, Thu?n is an intensely poetic writer. She relies so heavily on repetition that Surprising and brilliant...an astonishing work of sharp wit and profound tragedy that refuses to be flattened into a single representation. Thu?n recreates the rich texture of the past as it exists for those severed from their origins, a layering of memories, historical eras, and personal milestones that shifts and melds. Novels about the immigrant experience arent renowned for mirthtoo often they are drearily po-faced or blandly sentimental; so Simultaneously expansive and airtight. The premise of