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A review by ruxandra_grr
Ru by Kim Thúy
2.0
Totally silly complaint, but... I read this book because of its name. My name is very very rarely in fiction of any kind and some people call me 'Ru' and I thought it would be nice to see that in a book! Well, spoiler alert, this word is not mentioned in the book, only in the title and synopsis.
Beyond that, I was very open to the experience that this book would offer me, but it didn't really work for me. There are a bunch of CW (SA, CSA, ableism in multiple instances). I was upset from the beginning-ish, when the narrator says 'I will keep waging war against autism, even if I know already that it's invincible'. (One of her sons is autistic). There was another quite disturbing bit when she mentions That was horrible. There is also a bit about, ahem, cutting.
All in all, the writing of this book feels monotonous and detached, no matter if we're talking about the war atrocities, traditional garments or the plight of Vietnamese women. It is actually a series of lyrical vignettes where I was left hungry for conflict & plot, but we are never truly present in the action, it is all described at a distance.
Oh and I'm not saying that the communists in Vietnam at the time of the war were saints, they clearly were monstrous. It's just interesting that Americans and their part in the whole affair were hardly mentioned, yet the narrator talks about how her whole family chased The American Dream.
There are also weird class things, the narrator comes from a very affluent family in Vietnam (which became very working class in Canada, toeing the poverty line, possibly even crossed over into poverty), but servants in Vietnam are mentioned as 'servant', 'maid', 'maids who left with the rice jar' and there is no vignette about them! The intergenerational wealth and power (a lot of politicians in the family) is rather mourned and considered a right. Then there's the bit about the diamonds: 'As the country was at war and the market unstable, it was best to anticipate everything. Sometimes it was diamonds. All the Vietnamese women in our circle had a loupe for examining diamonds'. These things are presented matter-of-factly and unexamined.
But hey, literary experiments! It wasn't a lot of time to risk spending on a book I didn't like that much.
Beyond that, I was very open to the experience that this book would offer me, but it didn't really work for me. There are a bunch of CW (SA, CSA, ableism in multiple instances). I was upset from the beginning-ish, when the narrator says 'I will keep waging war against autism, even if I know already that it's invincible'. (One of her sons is autistic). There was another quite disturbing bit when she mentions
Spoiler
that one of her cousin basically assaulted one of her children and a disabled aunt and she didn't tell that cousin's mother so as not to break her heart.Spoiler
The narrator says how she wants to put in the same room girls from the West who cut themselves and sex workers from Vietnam who are invisibly wounded, basically traumatized on the inside and it just feels gross to do a ranking of trauma and pain and wounds.All in all, the writing of this book feels monotonous and detached, no matter if we're talking about the war atrocities, traditional garments or the plight of Vietnamese women. It is actually a series of lyrical vignettes where I was left hungry for conflict & plot, but we are never truly present in the action, it is all described at a distance.
Oh and I'm not saying that the communists in Vietnam at the time of the war were saints, they clearly were monstrous. It's just interesting that Americans and their part in the whole affair were hardly mentioned, yet the narrator talks about how her whole family chased The American Dream.
There are also weird class things, the narrator comes from a very affluent family in Vietnam (which became very working class in Canada, toeing the poverty line, possibly even crossed over into poverty), but servants in Vietnam are mentioned as 'servant', 'maid', 'maids who left with the rice jar' and there is no vignette about them! The intergenerational wealth and power (a lot of politicians in the family) is rather mourned and considered a right. Then there's the bit about the diamonds: 'As the country was at war and the market unstable, it was best to anticipate everything. Sometimes it was diamonds. All the Vietnamese women in our circle had a loupe for examining diamonds'. These things are presented matter-of-factly and unexamined.
But hey, literary experiments! It wasn't a lot of time to risk spending on a book I didn't like that much.