What is memory? How do we ever know what another person is thinking or how they are really living their life? Can research or interviews really get to the essence or truth about the life of another person?
Dao has his main character attempt to do this when he tries to write a biography of his Vietnamese grandfather, who was imprisoned for ten years by the new Communist Regime after the end of the war in the 1960s. But Dao always questions the tentative conclusions he reaches. Was his grandfather even Vietnamese? He was brought up by wealthy parents who sent him to an exclusive French school in Vietnam before the war. There he absorbed French culture and adopted French as his main language. When released he and his wife went to France to live. Despite many hours of interviewing the grandfather, Dao is still perplexed by his character.
As an academic who studied philosophy, several answers are mined briefly from these possibilities. But each possible answer has some objection that takes the author no further towards the truth. Is Dao playing games with his readers?
Our group found the book perplexing and most of us didn’t finish reading it.
As a Miles Franklin prize winner, it explores a complex life lived in Asia and Europe, without coming to any definitive conclusions.
Meg Dillon
Dao has his main character attempt to do this when he tries to write a biography of his Vietnamese grandfather, who was imprisoned for ten years by the new Communist Regime after the end of the war in the 1960s. But Dao always questions the tentative conclusions he reaches. Was his grandfather even Vietnamese? He was brought up by wealthy parents who sent him to an exclusive French school in Vietnam before the war. There he absorbed French culture and adopted French as his main language. When released he and his wife went to France to live. Despite many hours of interviewing the grandfather, Dao is still perplexed by his character.
As an academic who studied philosophy, several answers are mined briefly from these possibilities. But each possible answer has some objection that takes the author no further towards the truth. Is Dao playing games with his readers?
Our group found the book perplexing and most of us didn’t finish reading it.
As a Miles Franklin prize winner, it explores a complex life lived in Asia and Europe, without coming to any definitive conclusions.
Meg Dillon
