Andre Dao, Anam

 

• This novel was recently announced as the winner of the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for 2024. 

• It is certainly not a work of fiction in the usual sense. The people and events described are historically real. It’s more a bio infused with imaginative elements to bring the story alive, a blend of memory and history, and an intellectual journey. The narrator makes no concessions. As an undergraduate he read Derrida, a founding father of postmodernism and poststructuralism, and Husserl and his phenomenology.

• The Vietnamese war is the central focus. His family forbears were South Vietnamese and his grandfather an active supporter of the resistance to the Communist revolutionary forces under Ho Chi Minh. After the war ended in 1975 his grandfather was imprisoned for ten years for being a ‘non-communist intellectual’. The narrator spends a lot of time reflecting on his grandfather’s thoughts, friends, and experiences. He also takes us to Manus island camp, under Australia’s control. It has closed and the ‘boat people’ are being forced out. He became a migration lawyer, defending them. 

• But the narrator eventually realises he’s not retelling the story of his grandfather, he’s questioning it and interrogating it. And what about the contradiction presented by the Vietnamese refugees to Australia - after the war what were they fleeing from? Were they angry about the end of French colonialism and the retreat of the Americans? He now sees he’s writing a story about a story.

• There is a lot more to the novel than what I’ve described here. Dao delves deep into the family’s history - the grandmother, the aunts and uncles, and the narrator’s own relationship with his partner, Lauren, and their baby daughter Edith. All these elements add immense depth to the story, and increase the pleasure of reading it.