This novel is an extraordinary achievement. The plot is simple enough: an unnamed Australian narrator is at Cambridge working on a doctoral thesis about his Vietnamese roots. His partner, Lauren, and daughter, Edith, have travelled with him and the narrative swings from the deep theoretical basis of his research work to the quotidian chores of childminding. The result is an outstanding blend of history, law, literary theory and philosophy that explores the meaning of ‘home’: the Vietnam the family left behind.

The narrator glows with intelligence, but choosing to have him narrate in a calm, self-effacing voice avoids the trap lesser writers might have fallen into: trumpeting that rhetoric into a shouty polemic. The narrator’s accessible language means that the reader isn’t left behind. (At times I felt as if I was back in a tutorial on literary theory, listening to the smartest person in the room discussing Jacques Derrida and post-structuralism in a way that we could all understand.)

There are many overlapping layers.

At the core of the novel is the narrator’s research into his grandfather. He’s a contrarian. Devoutly Catholic in a predominantly Buddhist country. On the wrong side of the war in the 70s. Choosing not to flee the country afterwards, knowing he would be held as a political prisoner. Then remaining silent after his release to join his family, who are now living in France. The grandson narrator wonders whether this defiance relates to the sense of loss of the grandfather’s ‘home’.

There are many overlapping layers. There’s the interplay between different colonised populations and their respective colonisers. Despite the greatest Vietnamese diaspora being in the USA, when the family flee the country, they move to France. Their coloniser and root cause of the conflict that destroyed their ‘home’. The narrator’s father moved to Australia, and now the narrator is studying at the seat of learning tied to our coloniser. Mirroring the arrival of Vietnamese boat people, the narrator is helping ‘S’, a refugee stranded on Manus Island.

There are also seemingly random moments. Nothing is random, however. Everything has been expertly, subtly planned. When the narrator and Lauren meet, their first conversations are about Milton. There’s no mention of Paradise Lost. Dao lets the reader join the dots. Milton’s work could be a two-word explanation of this book. The narrator’s relationship with Lauren and Edith is not unlike his grandfather’s and grandmother’s: both men are ‘imprisoned’ – the narrator by his studies and the grandfather quite literally. The women are left to survive on their own in unfamiliar surroundings.

Lauren does have agency, however, and plays an important role in developing the narrator’s thesis. She argues that concentrating his research solely on his grandfather is patriarchal as it erases the grandmother’s story and her struggle to survive with seven children. Anam does not, nor cannot, exist. It is home and yet not-home: a place defined by loss; an imagined conflation of a particular time-space coordinate, together with strategic remembering and selective forgetting. Not quite nostalgia and certainly not utopia.

Anam is necessarily a slow read – there are weighty issues to absorb. It will benefit from rereading. Any university unit on any aspect of literary theory without this text in its reading list is doing its students a disservice. Dao’s prodigious talent is on display and shining so much brighter for being rendered so humbly.

Reviewed by Bob Moore

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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André is a research fellow with the ARC Laureate Program on Global Corporations and International Law at the Melbourne Law School. He was previously a PhD candidate at the Institute for International Law and the Humanities, also at the Melbourne Law School. His PhD research focused on the intersections between international human rights law and digital data technologies.