(versione italiana) On
18 April 2016,
at the Broadway
Columbia University,
Pulitzer
Hall 709,
New
York, U.S.A.,
was born a new and Brightest Star in the firmament of the planetary
literature: Viet
Thanh Nguyen!
Viet
Thanh Nguyen is not yet a writer known to the world, at least until
now, on Easter Monday of 2017. He is not, and he wasn't until a year
ago, even in his adopted country, the United States of America.
Viet
Thanh was born in Buôn
Ma Thuôt,
Vietnam,
in 1971.
In the 1975 his family fled to the United States for seeking
political asylum, after the fall of the regime supported by the
Americans in an attempt to colonize the country motivating the "armed
invasion" with the noblest of objectives of Western policy:
"import the democracy" in Vietnam through a bloody war,
bloody and painful of which the American people still bears deep
scars and indelible.
All
Vietnamese refugees who had supported the US Government, and who
managed to escape from the Vietnamese Revolution, they were greeted
immediately in several camps on US soil: Viet Thanh Nguyen's family
spent the first period of his stay in Pennsylvania,
at the refugee camp of Fort
Indiantown Gap.
Only
at the end of the ‘70 Viet and his family can start a life as free
citizens, and as true Americans, getting from the US government for
permission to relocate where they wanted to live from the moment they
set foot in the US: in California,
in San
Jose,
for climate and for humus
that was considered by Nguyen, at least in the imagination, the
closest to that of their country that they had loved and had
abandoned forever, to escape certain death.
It's
from California that the small Viet Thanh Nguyen began his studies
with passion, intelligence and determination, graduating in the May
1992 with honors in "English
Literature and Ethics"
studies; then becoming, in 1997, university professor in “English
and American Studies and Ethnicity”
in the prestigious University
of Southern California
in Los
Angeles.
Viet
starts writing novels, short stories and non-fiction books, as well
as performing with great diligence, competence and preparation his
profession of university professor.
In
the 2015, he published his first novel, "The
Sympathizer",
published by Grove Press, New York.
In
the April 18, 2016 Viet Thanh Nguyen won the most prestigious
literary awards in the world, the Pulitzer Prize, in the category
"Fiction", with the following motivation: «a
layered immigrant tale told in the wry, confessional voice of a “man
of two minds” and “two countries”, Vietnam and the United
States».
This
is the premise of the prestigious interview that Prof. Nguyen Viet
Thanh has given me today using the powerful information and
communication media available to us all; means that give me the
possible to get in touch with who I consider to be one of the best
and deepest writers in the twenty-first century.
Here's
my interview.
Prof.
Nguyen Viet Thanh, if you were to say something to our readers, as
artist and as a writer, what would you tell them?
When
you thought about writing this fiction, which were your project
objectives?
First,
to contest the way that the Vietnam War has been remembered globally,
which is primarily through American stories (in literature and in
film). This was perhaps the first war in history where the losers
(the Americans) were able to write the history instead of the
victors. The Vietnamese of all sides have been erased, silenced,
and/or mutilated in American stories, and while Vietnamese memories
in Vietnam and its diaspora are vastly different, they are not widely
known. So I thought of my novel as revenge against American stories,
and an attempt to write a different history of the war from
Vietnamese perspectives.
Second,
to write a novel that was universal in its discussion of war,
loyalty, betrayal, and revolution, and yet was unapologetically
rooted in the history of the Vietnamese.
I think that your fiction is the most interesting and shocking book
written in the last twenty years, for all that it contains, for the
quality of the narrative and for the deep psychological introspection
that with excellent skill you do for all the protagonists of your
history; at the same time, you have skillfully overturned, with thin
class and irony, the interpretative perspective of the War in
Vietnam. What does that say about it?
Thank
you! I think what my novel says is that there is no history or story
that has been told again and again, in highly repetitive ways, as the
American story of the Vietnam War has been told, that cannot be
upended and redone in a completely new way.
How
was your experience as Vietnamese Naturalized American in the United
States of America? What were the advantages and disadvantages of
being a refugee of war, naturalized in a country that still and
always gives priority to the merit and to the personal talent, and it
gives large space for professional and social success to all the
people?
As
a refugee in the United States, I always felt that I was a spy. I was
an American in my parents’ Vietnamese household, spying on their
strange customs, food, and language. Outside that home, I felt like a
Vietnamese spying on Americans in all their beauty and strangeness. I
learned never to take for granted what any culture told about itself,
to always be skeptical. This was an uncomfortable position to be in,
but a productive place for a novelist, who should always be both
empathetic and critical. In so far as I was a sympathetic skeptic, I
both deeply understood the power and seduction of the American Dream
that you refer to, and yet was also always aware of its pitfalls. The
American Dream is, in fact, made possible only by the American
Nightmare of genocide, slavery, colonization, warfare, racism, and
exploitation, as well as the denial of all those things. I came to
the United States because of the American Nightmare delivered to the
country of my birth, and I grew up in the United States as the
beneficiary of the American Dream. That is the contradiction that
made me who I am as a writer, and from which I cannot retreat but
must confront continually, as I do in The Sympathizer.
If
two children aged ten years come to you to ask with spontaneity,
innocence and curiosity: "Prof. Viet Thanh Nguyen, please,
explains us what is the Art?", How would you respond to this
question to make them understand what they want to know?
Art
is what you feel and what you believe, what you can see in your
mind’s eye. How to achieve what you see so that others can see it
too is a task of a lifetime, rooted in the emotional insights and
pain of who you are, as a child.
Will
you come in Italy to present your fiction "The Sympathizer"?
If yes, when and what will be the tour so that our readers can come
to hear you speak and to meet you for their autograph on his fiction
that will have bought?
I
would love to see Italy again, since my first and only encounter with
it was in the summer of 1998 when I backpacked through Rome, Venice,
and Florence. That was a wonderful, beautiful, and romantic
experience. I’ve been invited to a few festivals for the summer of
2017, and will decide soon whether I can attend.
Prof.
Nguyen Viet Thanh Thanks to you so much for giving me this interview
that I confess, it has flattered me and honored me so much ... and,
as you Americans say, break a leg ...
Thanks
to you, Andrea, for asking me the interview for your Italian readers.
For
more information about the Pulitzer Prize 2016, the writer Nguyen
Viet Thanh:
-
http://www.vietnguyen.info/
;
-
http://www.pulitzer.org/prize-winners-by-year/2016
;
-
http://www.pulitzer.org/winners/viet-thanh-nguyen
;
-
https://www.facebook.com/pulitzerprizes
;
-
https://www.facebook.com/vietnguyenauthor/
;
-
https://twitter.com/viet_t_nguyen
;
-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viet_Thanh_Nguyen
;
-
http://www.groveatlantic.com/#page=isbn9780802124944%20
;
-
http://www.neripozza.it/collane_dett.php?id_coll=3&id_lib=1024
.
-
For more
information about the author of the article:
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