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Title: The Gangster We Are All Looking For by Le Thi Diem Thuy ISBN: 0-375-40018-4 Publisher: Knopf Pub. Date: 06 May, 2003 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $18.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.86 (7 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Six Stars for a Poetic First Novel!
Comment: Le thi diem thuy has penned an extraordinary first novel in The Gangster We Are All Looking For, worth six stars if such a rating were offered. Unlike so many books today, le offers the reader a work which truly follows the writerly dictum, "Show, don't tell." Her work is a prose poem, lyrical in style, a masterpiece of understatement and mystery, beautifully combined with a childlike sense of magical realism. This is the new immigrant's experience in America, with all its confusion, loneliness, personal and familial disconnection, and the sense of loss of one's roots, of all that was once so familiar and normal.
At the center of the novel is the author/narrator, a nameless young Vietnamese girl who struggles desperately to cope with her sudden dislocation from her home country to Southern California, the absence of her mother, and the loss of her older brother. At the same time, she must decode the mysteries of American life, technology, and culture: the mysterious power landlords and bosses exert over her father, the racist behavior of schoolmates who begin referring to all Southeast Asian immigrant students as "Yang," to the awakening sexual behavior of neighborhood boys. A wonderfully-rendered episode early in the book gives a child's-eye view of glass animal figurines and a butterfly encased in glass. The narrator's magical fascination with the butterfly faintly recalls a butterfly scene in Garcia Marquez's "One Hundred Years of Solitude," although the scene in this book ends in unfortunate consequences for the little girl and her family.
The Gangster We Are All Looking For is not written in a strictly chronological sequence, but le's non-linear approach adds to the sense of childlike wonder as well as its sense of permanent loss. Her powerful descriptions and imagery, and her portrayal of her narrator's musings, echoes these feelings and creates an inescapable air of sorrow, as if her life will never be what it could and should have been. For these characters, America is not a land of opportunity but a refugee camp for displaced persons, a land that will forever be foreign for lives that will never feel fulfilled. This is a harsh but exquisitely-written fictional treatment of the underside of immigration: America as impossibly strange and culturally closed to outsiders, American life as the breaker of immigrant families, not just America as the mythical "Gold Mountain" or as the healer of lost souls. A wonderful exploration of the immigrant experience, marvelously told through a child's eyes.
Rating: 5
Summary: Growing up with conflicts and memories of Vietnam
Comment: This small novel is based on the experiences of the author, who, in 1978, at the age of 6, left Vietnam with her father, and settled in Southern California. It's a short book, merely 158 pages long, but yet it pulled me right into the story of this young girl's life and captured me with its simple yet lyrical quality.
Mostly, it's told from a child's point of view and we get to experience it all. First there's the well-meaning but misguided sponsor, and later there are several rundown apartments. There's a whole new language to learn. And an American school to master. Her father and mother work hard at low paying jobs. The father drinks. There are many arguments. Growing up full of conflicts and misunderstandings. And memories of Vietnam which can't be erased.
Through it all the girl keeps her sense of wonder. And that is where the beauty of this small book lies. The voice is fresh, the words are simple. And yet it rings with poetic beauty.
Rating: 5
Summary: Wonderful read. very enlightning.
Comment: I bought this book a few weeks ago, and was very touched by it. I live in San Diego and just this week this book was featured in the Reader. I am so glad! This book is what I will be recommending to anyone who asks. Thank you for this wonderful read.
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Title: The Book of Salt : A Novel by Monique Truong ISBN: 0618304002 Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Co Pub. Date: 07 April, 2003 List Price(USD): $24.00 |
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Title: Watermark: Vietnamese American Poetry & Prose by Barbara Tran, Monique T.D. Truong, Luu Truong Khoi, Truong Khoi Luu ISBN: 1889876046 Publisher: Temple Univ Press Pub. Date: June, 1998 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: The Unwanted: A Memoir of Childhood by Kien Nguyen ISBN: 0316284610 Publisher: Back Bay Books Pub. Date: 08 April, 2002 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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Title: Grass Roof, Tin Roof by Dao Strom ISBN: 0618145591 Publisher: Mariner Books Pub. Date: 07 January, 2003 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
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Title: The Woman Warrior : Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts by MAXINE HONG KINGSTON ISBN: 0679721886 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 23 April, 1989 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
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