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4.0 

A Man of Two Faces

By Viet Thanh Nguyen
A Man of Two Faces by Viet Thanh Nguyen digital book - Fable

Publisher Description

LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD

The highly original, blistering, and unconventional memoir by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sympathizer, which has now sold over one million copies worldwide

With insight, humor, formal invention, and lyricism, in A Man of Two Faces Viet Thanh Nguyen rewinds the film of his own life. He expands the genre of personal memoir by acknowledging larger stories of refugeehood, colonization, and ideas about Vietnam and America, writing with his trademark sardonic wit and incisive analysis, as well as a deep emotional openness about his life as a father and a son.

At the age of four, Nguyen and his family are forced to flee his hometown of Ban Mê Thuột and come to the USA as refugees. After being removed from his brother and parents and homed with a family on his own, Nguyen is later allowed to resettle into his own family in suburban San José. But there is violence hidden behind the sunny façade of what he calls AMERICATM. One Christmas Eve, when Nguyen is nine, while watching cartoons at home, he learns that his parents have been shot while working at their grocery store, the SàiGòn Mới, a place where he sometimes helps price tins of fruit with a sticker gun. Years later, as a teenager, the blood-stirring drama of the films of the Vietnam War such as Apocalypse Now throw Nguyen into an existential crisis: how can he be both American and Vietnamese, both the killer and the person being killed? When he learns about an adopted sister who has stayed back in Vietnam, and ultimately visits her, he grows to understand just how much his parents have left behind. And as his parents age, he worries increasingly about their comfort and care, and realizes that some of their older wounds are reopening.

Profound in its emotions and brilliant in its thinking about cultural power, A Man of Two Faces explores the necessity of both forgetting and of memory, the promises America so readily makes and breaks, and the exceptional life story of one of the most original and important writers working today.

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83 Reviews

4.0
Thinking Face““Vietnamese people are not voiceless! They are really loud! As arundhati roy says: there is no such thing as the ‘voiceless.’ There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard.” “Don’t be a voice for the voiceless. Abolish the conditions of voicelessness.””
Slightly Smiling Face“From the author of the Pulitzer prize-winning The Sympathizer, a personal and engaging memoir challenging the fundamental and ideological issues with the concept of America; and with the overarching theme of forgetting past trauma inflicted by colonization and the guilt that comes with it. Both controversial and worthwhile.”

About Viet Thanh Nguyen

Viet Thanh Nguyen was born in Vietnam and raised in America. He is the author of The Sympathizer, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and soon to be an HBO Original Series; its sequel, The Committed; the short story collection The Refugees; the nonfiction book Nothing Ever Dies, a finalist for the National Book Award; and is the editor of an anthology of refugee writing, The Displaced. He is the Aerol Arnold Professor of English and American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California and a recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur foundations. He lives in Los Angeles.

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