Review | Viet Thanh Nguyen’s short story collection, The Refugees, reveals haunting, haunted worlds
With masterful economy and ease, the Pulitzer Prize-winner subverts our expectations of the refugee experience, drawing out not just the buried trauma but also the dreams and hopes of those who leave their homeland and end up ghosts in a new country
by Viet Thanh Nguyen
Grove Press
In an opinion piece in The New York Times following the release of his 2016 Pulitzer Prize-winning debut novel, The Sympathizer , Vietnamese-American author Viet Thanh Nguyen describes himself as a refugee, rather than an immigrant.
“Refugees,” he wrote, “are the zombies of the world, the undead who rise from dying states to march or swim toward our borders in endless waves.”
So it’s perhaps no surprise that he should inscribe his debut collection of short stories, The Refugees, with the words of Chilean author Roberto Bolaño: “I wrote this book for ghosts, who, because they’re outside of time, are the only ones with time.”
Inside this extraordinary collection, Nguyen has given voice to a diverse range of refugees who have carved out new lives in their adopted land, America, but remain haunted by the ghosts of their former lives in Vietnam.
