Book Review - Anam
Melbourne-based author André Dao took 12 years to write this impressive debut novel, a profound meditation on remembrance and forgiveness inspired by his Vietnamese family’s experience of war and migration. The birth of his daughter prompts a human rights lawyer of Vietnamese heritage to embark on a quest to understand his grandparents’ traumatic past and his own identity. Studying at Cambridge, the nameless narrator decides to write their story as part of his thesis. After the Vietnam war, his grandfather, a Catholic intellectual, was detained without trial for 10 years in the notorious Chí Hòa prison in Ho Chi Minh City. Amnesty adopted him as a political prisoner. Trying to make sense of this incarceration, how it shaped his own career path, the narrator realises that “the stories my grandfather told me were all part of a bigger history”. Recognising the many names and identities imposed on Vietnam, he calls it Anam: “a place with a curious topography, bending as it does towards mem