Mãn

"Jack Yeager, who is a specialist in Vietnamese Canadian literature, says it’s pronounced mahn : there’s a pronunciation that you can’t quite get if your ear is not attuned. Kim Thúy is not the first Vietnamese francophone writer in Canada, but she is certainly is the most well-known, the one who’s had the most meteoric rise to fame. She was a refugee: her family came as boat people in the late 1970s. She has had several careers: she was a lawyer, she ran a restaurant. She had several incarnations before she decided to become a writer. She came to Georgetown last September and everybody fell in love with her because she such an exceptional presence. She’s so ebullient as person, with so much energy and joy. And her fiction has that kind of energy as well. What I find most interesting about her writing is that it draws on that clash of cultures and somehow finds a place within her main characters to resolve or work through the culture shock of arriving in Quebec, and then trying to make your way and find out who you are in that new space and that new language. Mãn is her second novel. It’s really a beautiful story about a woman who has three mothers, only one of whom is her biological mother. But that’s not the one she calls mother. Eventually, the one she calls mother arranges marriage for her with somebody who’s already emigrated to Quebec. She goes there and joins her husband in his restaurant business. One of the joys of this novel is that you get insights into the secrets of Vietnamese cuisine and all of the affect that goes into the food’s preparation, its presentation, its cultural valences. On top of that, it’s this amazing story of a woman—who had no expectation of being anybody—actually becoming somebody, having a career and eventually finding love in an extraordinary way. “It’s magical because it ends up making you feel like you learn her vocabulary for identity” It’s an enchanting novel, but it’s also fascinating because she chooses to write it like a dictionary with the Vietnamese word and the English (or French) translation in the margins of these fragments of text. From these fragments, she constructs a narrative that jumps sometimes between past and present, and here and there. It’s magical because it ends up making you feel like you learn her vocabulary for identity. I hope that people who pick this book up will not be put off by the fact that it looks like it’s fragmentary, because in the end, it weaves together a really beautiful story where food is a metaphor for love. All but one. There’s a wide variety of styles available. There’s genre fiction, which reads like genre fiction from just about anywhere, sometimes with a Quebec twist. Louise Penny lives in Montreal and is this amazingly successful detective novel writer. She writes in English and there’s a Quebec flavor even to what she does. So, there are novelists who write in very traditional or conventional ways. But I think Quebec has always had, perhaps by virtue of its difference and its place in North America, a complex relationship to the normative narrativity that it sees going on around it. In its films and its novels, you’ll quite often find a contrariness and refusal to conform to expectations. Sometimes they are linguistic expectations, in terms of the level of language: for a while, it was the fashion to write in street slang or joual . That was a protest, an identity gesture as well. “The willingness to experiment with form comes from the willingness to break with convention” But even in terms of the structure of the novel, if you look back to the 1970s, a lot of women writers were exploding generic boundaries. They weren’t writing pure fiction: they were writing fiction theory, or poetic fiction. And I think that the willingness to experiment with form comes from the willingness to break with convention. There’s a history of that in Quebec fiction and in Quebec culture more generally. They are somewhat iconoclastic in their more striking incarnations."