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Merle

Merle

The Tapestries: A Novel

The Tapestries: A Novel - Kien Nguyen One star, yikes, I should have known better than to read this book. But I wanted to read something set in Vietnam and written by an actual Vietnamese person about Vietnamese characters--not by and about Americans who fought in the Vietnam War--and this fit the bill. Unfortunately that was the only bill it fit. (What does that mean, anyway, fitting a bill? What kind of bill are we talking? Anyway.)

This is a wannabe-epic tale, set in early-20th-century Vietnam, of a boy whose family is killed, and who seeks revenge but falls in love with the killer’s granddaughter. It starts interestingly enough, with the boy’s first wife; he’s 7 and she’s 24, and his family arranges the “marriage” for the free labor. Then it gets bogged down in cliché, and in long boring chapters from the perspectives of minor characters. The characters’ emotions are stereotypical, their interactions clunky and simplistic, and much of the dialogue consists of their spouting grandiose pronouncements at one another. The villain would surely be twirling his mustache, if he had one. And everyone constantly makes idiotic decisions, without realizing their idiocy even in retrospect. It would be funny--sometimes it almost is--if it weren’t so slow and didn’t take itself so seriously. Instead it's just boring.

The cultural and historical detail is usually the one redeeming quality of even bad world fiction, but I’m not inclined to be generous here; the descriptions are rather tired, as is the language (although mostly competent, the writing is never fresh or arresting), and I doubt the author’s credibility. For instance, there’s a woman with bound feet, and early in the book we see her in a room full of people resting her bare feet on an ottoman. Whoa now! Bound feet looked and smelled terrible; a woman wouldn’t display them unshod. Then later in the book, her feet “though small, were no longer bound.” Whoa again! Footbinding included literally breaking the bones and reshaping the feet; there’s no going back, and trying to do so would make them worse. So if the author can’t even get the stuff I know about right, how can I trust him on anything else?

Basically, this is a tiresome melodrama--rarely does a conversation pass without someone "screaming" at someone else--that’s neither fun nor enlightening. I’m not surprised that it’s based on stories the author’s grandfather told him as a boy; the storyline and characters seem like they would most appeal to young children, although the vocabulary, slow pacing and level of violence put this book in adult territory. Sadly, then, I just wouldn’t recommend it to anyone.