Asymmetry | inventive, intelligent, metafiction

Review: 3 stars

I returned to work in November of last year, and while I’ve kept up with my reading, I haven’t with my blogging! Catching up now, I’ll start with Asymmetry, which had been on my radar for the past few months. I was very taken by the beautiful cover design, and it also helped that it was on the NYT 10 Best Books of 2018 list.

Asymmetry is the debut novel by Lisa Halliday, and upon initial examination, appears to be two completely disparate stories bound together only by the printing process. The novel opens with “Folly”, a chapter that outlines the whimsical, entirely charming encounter between Alice, an impressionable young writer, and Ezra Blazer, an acclaimed author in his sunset years. Their romance unfurls with the lovely nostalgia of knowing that the golden years are here and soon to fade. Little traditions like baseball games and blackout cookies bring their relationship startlingly to life. However, as much as you want Ezra and Alice to succeed, there is something that nags at you and forces you to probe beneath their quirky affection for one another.

This is where asymmetry as a theme first emerges. Ezra’s “education” of Alice begins gradually, but soon overwhelms. His age, wealth, worldliness and renown make themselves conspicuous. He gives her money with specific spending guidelines, instructs her to buy clothing from S-E-A-R-L-E, annoyingly spells out words for her, dials her at will from a “CALLER ID BLOCKED” number, gives her a list of canonical literature to read, so on and so forth. Although Alice is our protagonist, we are always one step removed from her emotions. She effaces herself from the reader similar to how she dissolves herself into Ezra’s preferred, haute ways of living. An event as traumatic as an abortion earns little less than a passing mention, which is both how Alice and the reader experience the act. When Ezra asks “Do you ever think this isn’t good for you?”, Alice answers immediately that “it’s very good” for her. The richness of Alice’s youth, talent and character are exploited and under-appreciated, and we wonder whether she will ever emerge from Ezra’s shadow to explore her full potential.

This question seemingly goes unanswered through the next two segments of the novel. The first, titled “Madness”, is a story of identity and brotherhood narrated by Amar, an Iraqi-American. The latter is an interview conducted between a BBC host and Ezra, where he relays the soundtrack to his life. “Madness” is a sophisticated exploration of Amar’s connections to Iraq and the experiences of being a man of his heritage, amidst today’s backdrop of ethic suspicion. Halliday’s odd choice of narrator and country are what make this chapter the most astounding. The vividness of Amar’s memories, his culture and his loyalties are truly authentic. Even as I found myself disengaging from this chapter due to lack of common ground, I realized this was the savvy of Halliday’s writing. She had created a narrative so real, in a tone so utterly different from the preceding chapter, that I found the transition jarring and difficult to continue reading with the same mindset.

While the metafiction aspects of the novel and semi-autobiographical details are what have been hailed as a “literary phenomenon” by critics, the connection truly is easy to miss. I won’t reveal it here, but while I found the concept certainly clever, I was simultaneously unconvinced by the true merit of the novel’s structure. It does create a more cerebral read, but the thread between the various segments were so tenuous, that I could not appreciate it during the reading itself.

The Sympathizer | satirical, open-ended, funny

Review: 5 stars

I follow Pulitzer Prize winners carefully, and picked up ‘The Sympathizer’ a year ago during a midnight Amazon binge. After a couple of false starts with the book, I finally got past the first chapter, and thank goodness, because it is now one of my favourite books.

‘The Sympathizer’ follows an anonymous narrator, ‘The Captain’, who is being held in North Vietnamese custody against his will. The narration of his confession sets in motion the novel, detailing his actions, thoughts and decisions before and during the war, through his evacuation from Saigon to America, and to his varied experiences abroad as a movie consultant and sleeper spy.

At face value, the Captain is a communist spy, working undercover in the confidences of the South Vietnamese and American police force. However, both his genetic identity and his experiences have lent him a deeply sympathetic nature. To those in Vietnam, he was seen as a half-breed outsider (his father was a French missionary), whereas to those in America, he is just another ‘yellow face’. Furthermore, his loyalties are hotly contested amidst the denouement of the Vietnam War. When Bon, his South Vietnamese friend, loses his wife and son during the evacuation of Saigon, the Captain’s whole body aches in sympathy. In direct contradiction, the Captain also comes off as a meek follower of Man, his co-communist conspirator. In one moment, the Captain effortlessly implicates and innocent as the true mole, whereas in another, he is haunted by the ghost of the innocent he helped kill. Born of divided affection, sympathy is the Captain’s Achilles heel - by feeling for all, he becomes traitor to all.

The protagonist is architected in such a way to reflect the moral debate around the Vietnam War, and to complicate the oversimplification of the conflict from the American perspective. By never aligning fully with one side, the protagonist leaves the reader in no-man’s land, with the impetus to learn more before forming judgement. There are stinging rebukes of America’s one-dimensional treatment of the Vietnam War, most clearly depicted in the Captain’s experience as a Vietnamese ambassador for the film, ‘The Hamlet’, an intentionally ill-disguised reference to ‘Apocalypse Now’. Also peppered throughout are the Captain’s truly laugh-out-loud observations of Vietnamese assimilation into America, human nature, and his own shortcomings. These not only serve up bite-sized witty realities, but lighten the mood of a largely sombre novel.

Nguyen, the author, has said in many interviews that he intended to write this novel mainly for a Vietnamese audience. He does not euphemise anything, and instead manipulates the Captain’s story to cast shadows and reflections on common beliefs about the Vietnam War. The novel’s conclusion is similarly open-ended, which was quite perplexing to me. In an allusion to Ho Chi Minh’s quote “Nothing is more important than Independence and Freedom”, the Captain finally has his epiphany that the answer to “What is more important than Independence and Freedom?” is in fact, “Nothing”. There many ways to read into this, but Nguyen deliberately leaves this thread untied for the reader to knot.

I highly recommend this novel - it is intelligent, thrilling and at many times, fun to read. For me, ‘The Sympathizer’ was reminiscent of ‘Catch-22’, another one of my favourite books. Nguyen has crafted a very successful novel, and I look forward to more from this original voice.

Exit West | imaginative, surreal, intimate

Review: 4 stars

‘Exit West’ was listed as a Top 10 book of 2017 by the New York Times, and so I ordered a copy off Amazon earlier this year. It piqued my interest because the novel seemed to be a contradiction - at once eerily realistic in its description of the refugee experience, all the while ignoring the laws of physics.

‘Exit West’ follows a pair of new, young lovers - Saeed and Nadia, who are" “subversives” in an anonymous Muslim country, teetering on the brink of civil war. The heady concoction of marijuana-tinged forbidden romance draws the two together, as curfews, bank runs and downed phone lines wreak havoc across their city. They catch wind of magical doors that are opening at random, bending distance to teleport willing travellers to unknown destinations. Thus begins Saeed and Nadia’s journey through this secretive network of doors, with each destination warping their relationship slightly more than the last.

Hamid has written a very clever story - one that adeptly blends ambiguity with the detailed emotional tapestry of the migrant experience. Saeed and Nadia could be fleeing Yemen, Syria or Somalia - their origin is of no import. By stripping this away and urging the reader to accept teleportation as reality, Hamid generalizes the refugee crisis so that it is the responsibility of the world. How would we act if a door were to spontaneously open in our bedrooms, shadowy, beleaguered figures emerging at all intervals throughout the day? What would we protect, what would we give? This surreal, yet genius interpretation of global diaspora insists upon activating the reader’s empathy.

I also thoroughly appreciated the deterioration of Saeed and Nadia’s romance, proving that circumstance and proximity are not enough to sustain love. Saeed is drawn more and more to the trappings of his home country, and shrouds himself in devout prayer. In contrast, Nadia finally feels as though she can shed her skin, and camouflage herself to be whoever she desires now. Their growing chasm is so honestly captured, and feels like a story repeated in every city in the world. Hamid writes this to illustrate their tenuous bond:

“Saeed wanted to feel for Nadia what he had always felt for Nadia, and the potential loss of this feeling left hm unmoored…Saeed made a point to smile with Nadia, at least sometimes, and he hoped she would feel something warm and caring when he smiled, but what she felt was sorrow and the sense that they were better than this, and that together they had to find a way out.”

This story feels old and clairvoyant at the same time. Refugees escaping certain persecution with uncertain promises awaiting at their destination. Upcroppings of peripheral migrant neighbourhoods, like outstretched tentacles from the world’s urban apexes. The right to electricity and connectivity wielded as new-age weapons by iinvaded authorities, against the invaders. New generations of ‘natives’, lighter in colour than those who previously donned the name.

This timeless novel successfully melds reality with fantasy, while providing a gentle, patient periscope into an unravelling relationship. I found it to be a thought-provoking read, and highly recommend it for those who would enjoy an inventive lens on today’s refugee crisis.