Review:The Frangipani Hotel: Stories by Violet Kupersmith

First published:- April 1st, 2014

Published by:- Spiegel & Grau

Star rating:- 

What your mind dredges up from memory and consciousness upon the utterance of the word 'Vietnam' is wholly predictable. That naked girl child of Trảng Bàng fleeing a napalm attack in terror, her scream silenced by the stillness of the well-known picture you have glanced at time and again or the grotesque image of blood-soaked bodies heaped by the side of a rice field in My Lai that continued to burn like a stinging slap across the face of the American administration long after the troops had pulled out of Vietnam. But the sheer tragedy of a nation being whittled down to the status of being defined by an ill-famed proxy war and a trendy word with an 'ism' at the end, has its roots in our collective apathy. 

Marguerite Duras' Indo-China (as described in her fictionalized memoir The Lover) was a place inextricably linked to the abuse of her childhood years, a cultural melting pot, an eerie and exotic landscape which served to simultaneously heighten and assuage her mental anguish, a nation still resigned to being seen as just another jewel in the crown of Europe. But Violet Kupersmith's Vietnam is the hum of the life force coursing through her veins; the horror and beauty that this culture encompasses, a hand-me-down from her ancestors. And it is this Vietnam, we have not cared enough to know, which inhabits these short stories. The tinge of paranormal intrigue and the elements of suspense are merely there to help you keep turning the pages with ease but it is the landscape itself which towers above the set of native Vietnamese characters and the Vietnamese diaspora in the U.S., metamorphosing into a humanly protagonist narrating a melancholic tale of personal woes.

The water nymph boarder of Hotel Frangipani, the ailing old Mrs Tran whose time on earth runs out while waiting for her now-American daughter and grand-daughters to visit her from far off Houston, the soldier-turned-calligrapher who cannot banish the horrifying memories of accidentally killing a civilian girl while serving the Viet Cong, the septuagenarian who involuntarily undergoes a morbid transformation into a giant python at times and ends up recounting the story of his life to a random Vietnamese American teen, the white girl who works at the American consulate in Ho Chi Minh are many among the imaginary guides that Ms Kupersmith designates to familiarize readers with an assortment of folktale-ish stories with elements of horror as the common running theme.

To quibble, some of the stories have been fashioned in an amateurish way in which character tropes such as the thoughtful, unattractive, fat sister and the insensitive, skinny one and the ignorant, condescending American tourist abound. But the structural and thematic integrity of the remaining stories made up for the flaws of the former and caused my 3 stars to be elevated to 3.5 stars.

Subtlety isn't Ms Kupersmith's strongest suit but her writing serves as a good example of potency of theme and plot surpassing the need for linguistic adornments at times and a rude reminder of my little to no knowledge of Vietnam sans the 'war', an oversight which needs to be remedied post haste. 

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Review also posted on Goodreads & Amazon.

Review: We need new names by Noviolet Bulawayo

Noviolet Bulawayo (Bulawayo is presently the name of Zimbabwe's second largest city) aka Elizabeth Tshele (her real name) was the surprise name in the Booker shortlist this year since she is the first Zimbabwean to be considered for the prestigious honor. I read 'We need new names' after it was longlisted since my foray into African literary landscape has been very limited so far. And this review was written before the shortlist was announced. And to be honest I didn't expect it to be included. The book starts out with a novel intention but somehow isn't able to achieve its target, which is to help the reader develop an emotional connection with her characters. Or that's what I thought. Obviously, the Booker committee thought differently. Now begins my former review:-

First published:- May 21st, 2013
Star rating:-

Books like this one have me fumbling around for the right approach to review them, because they try to cram in too much within the scope of a regular sized novel and consequently just stop short of resonating strongly with the reader. 

It's like Bulawayo had a message to give me, something potent and fiercely honest enough to burn right through all my prejudices and cherished misconceptions and leave me staring right at all the cold, hard facts. But then halfway into it, her voice went off in various tangential directions in an effort to tackle too many issues at one go and lost most of its intensity. 
As a result the message that she had set out to deliver, gave off the impression of poor phrasing and ended up sounding half-hearted and rather dubious.

If I try my absolute best, I can only delineate this as a search for identity, a raw account of coming to terms with the after-effects of displacement. Or an attempt at summarizing in a few hundred pages the feelings of being neither here nor there. 

But then Bulawayo let me know so much more. She told me about the experiences of surviving on a few stolen guavas, walking barefoot on the burning asphalt of the dusty road and yet enjoying the smug satisfaction of playing 'Find Bin Laden'with equally destitute and miserable kids of your age. And what it feels like to flee from and forget the tattered remains of a land you were born in simply because it could not offer you the promise of a fulfilling life ahead anymore - a land torn apart by strife, ethnic violence and unstable, unsympathetic governments. The irony of silently selling away your dignity in a foreign country in exchange for a life better than what your own motherland could afford to bestow upon you. The feeling of being swept up in the vortex of too many rapidly occurring changes as an illegal immigrant and the utter hopelessness of never really belonging anywhere. 

Bulawayo may not be capable of subtlety or stringing beautiful words together into lengthy sentences fraught with imagery, but she has a compelling and unique voice of her own nonetheless. 

I will surely look out for her other works in the future.

**A 3.5 stars that could not be rounded off to a 4**