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Product Description
Review
Heather’s Pick
Winner 2011 – Grand prix littéraire Archambault
Winner 2011 – Mondello Prize for Multiculturalism
Winner 2010 – Prix du Grand Public Salon du livre––Essai/Livre pratique
Winner 2010 – Governor General’s Award for Fiction (French-language)
Winner 2010 – Grand Prix RTL-Lire at the Salon du livre de Paris
"This is an exemplary autobiographical novel. Never is there the slightest hint of narcissism or self-pity. The major events in the fall of Vietnam are painted in delicate strokes, through the daily existence of a woman who has to reinvent herself elsewhere. A tragic journey described in a keen, sensitive and perfectly understated voice."
—Governor General's Literary Award jury citation
“Gloriously, passionately, delicately unique…. A remarkable book; one that has well-earned every note of praise it has received.”
—The Chronicle Journal
“Powerful and engaging.... In short entries that read lyrically and poetically—but also powerfully, pungently, and yet gently, dispassionately—Ru blends politics and history, celebration and violence within a young girl’s imaginative experience…. [I]ts hybrid and enchanted voice conjur[es] a love song out of chaos and pain, singing and rilling its simplicities.”
—Winnipeg Free Press
“In a series of vignettes which extend from wartime Vietnam to the hospitable precincts of Quebec, Kim Thúy writes with equal delicacy and candor about a childhood marked by horrifying brutality, and the pleasures of ordinary peace. A brave and moving book, bringing lucid insight both to the costs of violence, and elusive processes of psychic survival.”
—Eva Hoffman, author of Lost in Translation
Winner 2011 – Grand prix littéraire Archambault
Winner 2011 – Mondello Prize for Multiculturalism
Winner 2010 – Prix du Grand Public Salon du livre––Essai/Livre pratique
Winner 2010 – Governor General’s Award for Fiction (French-language)
Winner 2010 – Grand Prix RTL-Lire at the Salon du livre de Paris
"This is an exemplary autobiographical novel. Never is there the slightest hint of narcissism or self-pity. The major events in the fall of Vietnam are painted in delicate strokes, through the daily existence of a woman who has to reinvent herself elsewhere. A tragic journey described in a keen, sensitive and perfectly understated voice."
—Governor General's Literary Award jury citation
“Gloriously, passionately, delicately unique…. A remarkable book; one that has well-earned every note of praise it has received.”
—The Chronicle Journal
“Powerful and engaging.... In short entries that read lyrically and poetically—but also powerfully, pungently, and yet gently, dispassionately—Ru blends politics and history, celebration and violence within a young girl’s imaginative experience…. [I]ts hybrid and enchanted voice conjur[es] a love song out of chaos and pain, singing and rilling its simplicities.”
—Winnipeg Free Press
“In a series of vignettes which extend from wartime Vietnam to the hospitable precincts of Quebec, Kim Thúy writes with equal delicacy and candor about a childhood marked by horrifying brutality, and the pleasures of ordinary peace. A brave and moving book, bringing lucid insight both to the costs of violence, and elusive processes of psychic survival.”
—Eva Hoffman, author of Lost in Translation
Product Description
A runaway bestseller in Quebec, with foreign rights sold to 15 countries around the world, Kim Thúy's Governor General's Literary Award-winning Ru is a lullaby for Vietnam and a love letter to a new homeland.
Ru. In Vietnamese it means lullaby; in French it is a small stream, but also signifies a flow - of tears, blood, money. Kim Thúy's Ru is literature at its most crystalline: the flow of a life on the tides of unrest and on to more peaceful waters. In vignettes of exquisite clarity, sharp observation and sly wit, we are carried along on an unforgettable journey from a palatial residence in Saigon to a crowded and muddy Malaysian refugee camp, and onward to a new life in Quebec. There, the young girl feels the embrace of a new community, and revels in the chance to be part of the American Dream. As an adult, the waters become rough again: now a mother of two sons, she must learn to shape her love around the younger boy's autism. Moving seamlessly from past to present, from history to memory and back again, Ru is a book that celebrates life in all its wonder: its moments of beauty and sensuality, brutality and sorrow, comfort and comedy.
Ru. In Vietnamese it means lullaby; in French it is a small stream, but also signifies a flow - of tears, blood, money. Kim Thúy's Ru is literature at its most crystalline: the flow of a life on the tides of unrest and on to more peaceful waters. In vignettes of exquisite clarity, sharp observation and sly wit, we are carried along on an unforgettable journey from a palatial residence in Saigon to a crowded and muddy Malaysian refugee camp, and onward to a new life in Quebec. There, the young girl feels the embrace of a new community, and revels in the chance to be part of the American Dream. As an adult, the waters become rough again: now a mother of two sons, she must learn to shape her love around the younger boy's autism. Moving seamlessly from past to present, from history to memory and back again, Ru is a book that celebrates life in all its wonder: its moments of beauty and sensuality, brutality and sorrow, comfort and comedy.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
3.0 out of 5 stars (1 customer review)
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Straw Fires, Feb 5 2012
By Diethelm Thom - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Ru (Hardcover)
Kim Thuy wrote this book when she was over 40. As a survivor of the boat people in Canada she lived out her American Dream and now thinks back to her upper middle class childhood in Saigon and life there, to the sufferings under the victorious Communists, to her life in the refugee camps in Malaysia and how she was welcomed in Canada, and finally to her return to Vietnam as an Americanized Vietnamese woman. Small wonder that the contrasts she experienced overpower her and explain her pathos.What is characteristic of the book is the series of short sensually remembered scenes of the various phases of her life, which often flare up like lurid flashlights and are presented in non-chronological order. I think that these fragments of memory in their strangeness account for the appeal of the book - scenes like these can only be lived through in extreme real situations, you cannot make them up. There is no coherent overall picture , the writer gives herself over to her memories and reflexions, but what is missing is something like a critical or individual voice. In a way she stays on the surface, which makes for a certain attractiveness, but also marks the limits of her report. You get something like an idea of her life - particularly if you already happen to know the country and its history - but these impressions will not be left on your mind as a coherent and critical tale. The narrator again and again kindles new straw fires of her memories, sometimes they lighten up unbelievable or grotesque scenes, but I am afraid that these isolated impressions will also quickly vanish like straw fires.
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