Eugene weekly., December 14, 2017, Image 10

fiction
The Refugees by Viet Thanh Nguyen. Grove Press, $25.
IL LUS T R ATIONS BY SA R A H DECK ER
I
was listening to a rerun of Wait, Wait, Don’t
Tell Me on KLCC the other day, and it featured
an interview with prolific romance novelist
Nora Roberts (who is also a prolific crime writer
under the name J.D. Robb.)
When asked if she ever gets writer’s block, she
responded that she’d never let herself believe in
it. “Writing is as much a habit as it is an art and a
craft. If you walk away from it, you are breaking
the habit. If you are writing crap, you are still
writing and you can fix it.”
I love that, and while I have experienced
writer’s block, I’ve always battled it by sitting
down and writing.
One thing I’ve never experienced is reader’s
block. It too is more than a habit; it’s a mental
getaway or sometimes a reality check. I can
always sit down and read, no matter where I am
or what mood I’m in. And this year, yet again,
Eugene Weekly presents you with all that we have
read and enjoyed this year. — Camilla Mortensen
‘The person, be it gentleman
or lady, who has not pleasure
in a good novel, must be
intolerably stupid.’
― JANE AUSTEN, NORTHANGER ABBEY
k = OREGON AUTHOR OR OREGON-CENTRIC BOOK
10
December 14, 2017 • eugeneweekly.com
Since 2016, Viet Thanh Nguyen has published three
incredible books that offer a vibrant glimpse into the
world of Vietnamese-American life and history, as well
as invaluable insights into the effects of the war itself.
The first, Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory
of War, is nonfiction and an extension of Nguyen’s
academic career. The others, The Sympathizer and this
collection of short stories, The Refugees, are his first
published works of fiction. I highly recommend all
three, but The Refugees is a perfect starting point, given
its brevity and accessibility. These stories take place in
the U.S. and Vietnam, and though varied in character
and tone, all serve to communicate a vital and lucid
vision of Vietnamese-American identities and realities.
For me, these stories felt like befriending a community I knew existed
yet had only caught vague glimpses of from the outside before suddenly
being given access to it, in very colorful and complex detail. Nguyen does
a terrific job of lacing background information into narrative, offering a
stunning opportunity to consider life in a tight-knit minority community
trying to retain, but also refashion, its identity in a new country after a dirty
war whose legacy lives on in overwhelming, complicated ways. — Paul
Quillen
Kurt Vonnegut: Complete Stories
Seven Stories Press, $45.
When Kurt Vonnegut died in 2007 at
the age of 84, American literature lost not
only one of its most distinct and inventive
voices but also the finest and most
durable representative of a generation
of writers whose output and impact is
not likely to be repeated. Vonnegut, who
came of age during the Great Depression
before witnessing the firebombing of
Dresden as a private in the Second World
War, cut his teeth writing short stories for
slick popular magazines in the 1950s. It’s
here that he developed a voice that was
clear and plainspoken, almost avuncular,
and yet beneath his homey style burbled
a visionary impulse that was equal parts
prophesy, moral outrage and Twain-like
satire aimed at the apocalyptic idiocy of
the damned human race.
“The moral story is gone,” Dave
Eggers laments in the foreword to Kurt Vonnegut: Complete Stories, an
absolute brick of a book (more than 900 pages!) that compiles everything
from previously published stories to those dug posthumously out of
the archives. Early stories reveal a young writer tip-toeing gently but
diligently into his craft, penning fables that read like the chiding pastorals
of Sherwood Anderson and James Joyce. It’s the later, mid-career work
— and there’s a ton of it here — that captures this great American author
in full stride. Classic corkers like “Harrison Bergeron” and “Welcome to