Le's fifth novel but first to be translated into English: a tense,
bitter portrayal of a Vietnamese family blighted by insanity,
adultery, and incest, observed by the daughter who labors to
distance herself from her depressing, indeed disastrous, origins.
Written in French and first published in 1993, this spare,
cunningly fashioned tale juxtaposes a riot of powerful sensory
impressions against - and as correlatives of - the narrator's
vitriolic memories. The novel's rigorous nihilism, however,
undercuts its considerable artistry; the reader shares the
narrator's wish to escape from this experience, and to forget it as
quickly as possible. (Kirkus Reviews)
Like author Linda Le, the young woman who narrates this novel is
from Vietnam and is a writer, a "dirty foreigner writing in
French." The narrator has distanced herself not only from
Vietnamese society but also from her family. Her story is an
exercise in clear-eyed fury revealing three generations of a cursed
family. The grandfather was a lunatic the family locked away and
declared dead to avoid shame; the father is a failed artist and
humiliated cuckold; the mother is a simpering beauty consumed with
lust; the uncle is declared insane because of his incestuous love
for his sister, who hanged herself. The narrator, on the verge of a
profound depression ever since her mother told her she was
illegitimate, alternates her story with her uncle's journal. In an
acid style burning with compressed lyricism and savage irony, these
parallel monologues sketch misfortune's family tree.
Linda Le, who traveled at age fourteen from Saigon to France
with a wave of "boat people," is one of the leading young novelists
on France's brave new literary scene. "Slander" is Le's fifth--and
most celebrated--novel.
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