Especially satisfying for someone like myself who has felt deeply connected to Vietnam, it's people, history, colonizations, invasions, etc. most of my now fairly long life! A very accessible (ie. clearly, skillfully written) read.Great depth especially in terms of connecting Vietnam's past to the present.Seems actually a loving, brilliant gift given by a young American author of Vietnamese ancestry, honouring the generation that survived the last war with the US.Extraordinary ideas! Had not realized (or forgot) these stories were based on folk tales told to the author by her grandmother. Can't recommend this excellent short story collection highly enough! This collection has been billed as ghost stories about the Vietnam War...but maybe not in the way you might assume. Yes, there are ghosts. Yes, the war is mentioned in many different contexts. Older characters remember it. Younger ones have heard of it, or grew up as refugees because of it. But Kupersmith keeps her perspective on the war to a kind of sidelong glance. The war is alluded to over and over, but there are no Tim O'Brien tales here. These stories are preoccupied with other things--with sinister twins, were-snakes, demon women, crumbling hotels, loud Americans...and with crummy day jobs in Houston, retirement homes, and the perplexity of people who have fled their country--should they try to return, or live out their days in a foreign land?Kupersmith has a light, energetic style with some deceptive depths. Her strongest stories are chilling and memorable because they offer no comfortable handholds. The lead story, told entirely in dialogue, shows us an American-Vietnamese schoolgirl pestering her grandmother for the tale of how she fled the country on a raft during the war. Instead, her grandmother tells her another story: she and her husband were caught on their fishing boat on stormy seas, half-drowned and desperate, when they were approached by the corpse of a man walking over the water. The corpse neared them and stood by, watching in silence as they pleaded with it. Then it left. If there's any moral, the grandmother says, it's that the question isn't, "How did you escape the war?" It's "Did you escape the war?"There are half a dozen superb stories here, along with a few more that are less memorable. One story, "Skin and Bones," baffled me, and the concluding story seemed markedly weaker than so many of the others. At times I wanted the work to push just a little harder, to be less breezy and more layered. Overall, though, I enjoyed these stories and savored the consistency of tone and mood throughout the collection. Kupersmith is at work on a novel, apparently--it will be worth picking up when it comes out.
Do You like book Frangipani Hotel: Fiction (2014)?
I enjoyed this book of short stories about ghosts 'that grapple with the legacy of the Vietnam War.'
—ali
It was okay, but very uneven - sometimes the writing, sometimes the story wavered.
—joan
Vientamese folk tales = scary and awesome.
—098leslie
