Ocean Vuong

From that longlist of 49 novels here, nominated by libraries from all around the world, today a shortlist of six novels was announced.

Bernardine Evaristo Valeria Luiselli Colum McCann Ocean Vuong Colson Whitehead

I’ve only read one, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous and unfortunately despite the lyrical language, it wasn’t for me. I did recently read Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad and have heard good things about The Nickel Boys.

I would love to read Lost Children Archive having read her long essay Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions (a nonfiction narrative of Luiselli’s stay in NY and decision to assist child migrants who travel alone to the US to fill in the 40 question survey they must respond to within 21 days of arrival) in preparation to read her novel. And Girl, Woman, Other is another I’ll get around to eventually.

Colum McCann is an author I have enjoyed in the past, but a 500 page novel wading into the Israeli Palestinian narrative by focusing on two families who lost daughters and develop a friendship, sits uncomfortably, described by Susan Abulharwa as a colonialist misstep in commercial publishing.

Here is what the judges had to say about these six titles:

Lost Children Archive by Valeria Luiselli (Mexico)(nominated by Bibliotecha Vila de Gràcia, Spain)

Lost Children Archive “Two journeys—one of countless migrant children making their way up from Central America and Mexico to the US border, and another of a fragile young family taking a road trip down from New York to the Mexican border—come together in this imaginative, heartfelt, and entirely original novel.

Interweaving works of literature, music, maps, photographs, and other documents with multiple narrative voices, Luiselli has composed a masterpiece that is at once an exhilarating, lyrical road novel and an unsparing meditation on dislocation, remembering, and storytelling. Timely and timeless, Lost Children Archive is an immersive work that transports, unsettles, and ultimately elevates the reader.”

Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo (UK)(nominated by libraries in Germany and Ireland)

Dublin Literary Award Shortlist 2021 “A magnificent book fuelled by its own unique energy – one which catapults the novel form into an original, exhilarating direction. Twelve women’s lives are vigorously revealed, each character given an individual chapter of their own. And yet within these chapters Evaristo skilfully weaves all of their worlds together.

The result: an astonishing tapestry of women’s lives – flaws and all – and of the wide-ranging and spirited experiences that have made them who they are. A bravura feat of storytelling by a writer at the top of her game, which vividly celebrates the voices of intergenerational black British women in contemporary times.”

Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor (Mexico) translated from Spanish by Sophie Hughes (nominated by libraries in Canada, Mexico and the USA)

Fitzcarraldo Editions Translated Fiction “Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season is a ferocious novel that challenges and astonishes in equal measure. It portrays the most painful margins of a Mexican underworld of poverty and corruption, a universe dominated by a merciless violence that is deeply embedded in the community and in the actions and thoughts of its inhabitants, almost obscuring ant trace of empathy and humanity.

The novel’s hyperrealist language displays striking power, a direct, brutal and incisive energy that transports you headlong into the centre of a hurricane where there seems to be little hope or redemption. Sophie Hughes’ English translation succeeds in transmitting the expressive force and richness of Melchor’s Spanish. It is a novel that does not give you a break and that drags you in its verbal current, so torrential and intense, towards the darkest entrails of humankind, where the shadows live. An extraordinary book.”

Apeirogon by Colum McCann (Ireland) (nominated by South Dublin Libraries, Ireland)

Dublin Literary Award Shortlist “They were so close that, after a while, Rami felt that they could finish each other’s stories”— Exploring Rami Elhanan and Bassam Aramin’s friendship and peace activism after the killings of their young daughters, Colin McCann’s novel Apeirogon, true to its title, ambitiously presents “a countably infinite number of sides” in its expansive exploration of injustice, loss, relationality and resilience.

Its visionary mapping of displacements and returns, as well as its inventive structure of fragments and blank spaces open up alternative narrative pathways for the histories and futures of Palestine and Israel, powerfully suggesting that “Anywhere is reachable. Anything is possible, even the seemingly impossible.”

On Earth Were Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong (Vietnamese/American)(nominated by libraries in Norway, Sweden, Switzerland & the USA)

On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous Ocean Vuong “Ocean Vuong’s stunning debut novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is characterised by the same lyricality and powerful use of language he employs in his poetry. The novel takes the form of an extended letter.

A young Vietnamese America man writes to his mother sharing his story and revealing how his story’s inseparably bound to hers. As Vuong’s narrator finds his voice he entertains questions of class and ethnicity, language and sexuality. It’s a captivating and tender story shot through with moments of pure, unsettling humanity. Vuong wants his readers to see that even the most mundane of moments can be briefly gorgeous and transformative.”

The Nickle Boys by Colson Whitehead (American) (nominated by libraries in Belgium and the USA)

The Nickel Boys Colson Whitehead “Colson Whitehead’s emerged as a leading chronicler of African-American experience with The Underground Railroad in 2016. Where The Underground Railroad was expansive in its imagination, The Nickel Boys returns to the traumas of African-American history with a very different literary style. Set in a juvenile institution in Florida – the ‘Nickel Academy’ – in 1960s, Whitehead here writes with a pared-down narrative and prose style, tracing the scars of the past in the lives of the present. The writing is spare, clean, and direct; and the result is a novel that not only casts light on a dark moment of African-American history, but also speaks to stories of institutional abuse everywhere.”

The winner will be announced on 20 May 2021 as part of the opening day programme of the International Literature Festival Dublin.

Have you read any of these or do you plan to?

I loved listened to Ocean Vuong talking about writing, he’s an incredibly articulate speaker and an accomplished poet, his writing sophorific and it is easy to be lulled into it’s cadence and rhythm. I am the kind of reader who often prefers a poet’s prose to their poetry, easily swayed by the poet’s promise of enrapture in the long form.

I loved the premise of this novel, a letter to an illiterate mother, a lofty intellectual promise, a notion that allows for a lack of self consciousness, a daring fearlessness of judgment, knowing she can and will never read it.

This was my second attempt to read fiction after a long pause, and with hindsight, it was not the best choice. I was lured into reading it looking for something other than what I found, or did it lose sight of itself and its intention, a letter to a mother, is it fair that we come to it with expectations? I can only ask that question now with some distance from the narrative because at the time of reading, it was too raw.

For me, it too often felt like the letter writer, the narrator was looking at himself, reliving intimate experiences and I wondered why it was he felt a mother needed to be witness to all of that, in such detail. Yes, it is a beautifully written account, and many have and will read it with little recollection of its purpose and find only beauty in its construction.

The parts I enjoyed most were the recounting of aspects of Ma (Rose’s) and Lan’s lives, the comparison of the nail salon to the tobacco fields, the sacrifices one generation makes for another, the divide between the educated and the uneducated, families fragmented by an internal cultural divide, a sense of loss, the necessity of letting go.

Somehow he managed to survive his proximity to drugs and addiction, thanks perhaps to his intelligence or ambition to express himself, perhaps I wanted less poetry and more story around community and the connections that lifted him out of becoming another statistic. I look forward to seeing what comes next, how he chooses to uses his gift. It is beautifully written, in a lyrical flow, a coming of age incantation, an author to watch.

I was sad to read that the author’s mother passed away in November 2019 at the tender age of 51, Ocean Vuong shared this news and a photo of her on his Instagram page, honoring her, and all working class mothers who had put their heads down through decades of back breaking work so their children could hold their heads up.

Born in war but having lived in peace, she now begins her journey through the bardo. What can a son say to the great loss from which he owes his own life? Only that my world has changed forever. it can never be what it was. it is absolutely less—and yet perennially more because of what you have given me, Ma. you taught me that our pain is not our destiny—but our reason. you gave me all the reasons. thank you. i bow to you. i will see you again. every word was always for you. every sentence a life (- giving) sentence. Ocean Vuong