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A review by pascalthehoff
Chinatown by Thuận
2.0
Chinatown is a book by a Vietnamese author for people that are deeply familiar with Vietnam. For all others, sneaking a peek into that culture is the biggest appeal of the novel. Chinatown gives great insight into the complex historical, political, social and cultural connections of Vietnam to other regions across the entire world, all through the eyes of one character (and her novel-within-a-novel protagonist).
For every interesting insight, however, there are vast stretches of prose that are too cryptic for their own good. It’s a case where the lyrical gain of experimental prose doesn’t outweigh the confusion. Maybe that’s due to the translation (which, I trust, is as best as it gets, with the wild linguistical dichotomies between Vietnamese and English). The final nail in the coffin for me was the wall-of-text typography: the entire novel is written in a single paragraph. The stylistic repititions only exacerbate the problem. I respect the choice to do something radical with the visuals in the page, but the experiment isn’t worth the immense loss in readability.
For every interesting insight, however, there are vast stretches of prose that are too cryptic for their own good. It’s a case where the lyrical gain of experimental prose doesn’t outweigh the confusion. Maybe that’s due to the translation (which, I trust, is as best as it gets, with the wild linguistical dichotomies between Vietnamese and English). The final nail in the coffin for me was the wall-of-text typography: the entire novel is written in a single paragraph. The stylistic repititions only exacerbate the problem. I respect the choice to do something radical with the visuals in the page, but the experiment isn’t worth the immense loss in readability.