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Aug 27, 2015wyenotgo rated this title 3 out of 5 stars
Winner in the 2015 "Canada Reads" competition held annually by the CBC. This book is designated as a novel, although it seems more like a personal memoir. Moreover, it reads very much as if the author had kept a diary over many years of a chaotic life in Viet Nam, Malaysia, Canada and Thailand, and had at some point dropped all the pages, gathered most of them up and not bothered to sort them out in their original sequence. It was originally written in French and brilliantly translated by Shiela Fishman into English, with the exquisite prose intact -- surely a remarkable achievement in itself. I found it to be very restrained and at times almost detached in its depiction of some truly horrific experiences; the author chose to use beautiful, elegant, almost poetic language rather than shocking the reader in a direct manner. That may have been a form of the well known coping mechanism of people who are subjected to extreme emotional or physical trauma -- stepping out of their own body and personality and addressing the situation as if they were outside observers.