He omits a third association – anamnesis as a literary technique of recollection or reminiscence,most famously deployed in that first morsel of Proust’s madeleine. And in Proustian fashion,the narrator’s mind moving “not with the logic of the body but the illogic of the dream”,his attention strays to his time as a human-rights lawyer for refugees imprisoned on Manus,then slides into a memory of his grandfather imprisoned in Chi Hoa,and then on and on again still,until the libraries of Cambridge dissolve into Hanoi,Paris,Melbourne,Saigon.
It feels absurd to flattenAnam into such particulars;slipping as it does between generations,conversations,speculations and stories,it is not simply a book about memory;rather,the novel’s looping form becomes its own lesson.
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Some sentences are so lyrical that they fill almost a page before finding an end;some chapters are so precise they barely span a page. As this collection of fragments grows,simultaneously falling together and apart,the text becomes palimpsest and archive,returning again and again to questions that haunt the novel – how might one take seriously “the life of the mind”? How might one write the Other ethically,or commit the self to the page? How might we find home – or,perhaps,how might we live an ethical life,on unceded land?
The text is thick with references to other writers and philosophers – Alexis Wright,Tran Duc Thao,Jacques Derrida,Simone Weil,Frantz Fanon – in a spirit of intellectual community that rejects the notion of singular genius or perhaps even plain old narcissism,a critique often levelled at writers of autofiction.
Of course,in a book so aware of itself as a book,the narrator anticipates criticism:“Why don’t you just say what you mean? And why can’t you say it without referencing someone else?” Yet it is only alongside these thinkers that one can sustain such a critical undertaking. In an author’s note,Dao writes:“This novel converses with,borrows from,remembers and forgets many traditions … a comprehensive list of all my sources is neither possible nor desirable:one of the concerns of this novel is how we deal with our inheritances,literary or otherwise.”
Nearing the end of Anam,in a letter to his daughter,the narrator writes that the city of Hanoi is a swamp,built on lakes – “it’s all pretty enough,like a postcard,but in the end it will sink back into the miasma”. So the water,with its perfect memory,swirling and suspended,is still trying to get back to where it was.
Anam is a rigorous and generous book,which will sit with you well after reading. “We cannot transcend ourselves,” the narrator says. “Yet it is the promise of such transcendence that brings us back to literature.”Anam is transcendent.
Andre Dao is a guest at Melbourne Writers Festival (mwf.com.au) and Sydney Writers’ Festival (swf.org.au). Leah Jing McIntosh is founding editor ofLiminal magazine
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