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Monday, August 16, 2021

"How to Pronounce Knife" by Souvankham Thammavongsa

How to Pronounce Knife  by Souvankham Thammavongsa is the August read for my "Clever Name" book club. It was on many "best of 2020" lists and nominated for many awards, including the prestigious Scotiabank Giller Prize here in Canada.  

Thammavongsa was born in a Laotian refugee camp in Thailand, but grew up in Toronto and still lives here. Not surprisingly, her stories are mostly about the immigrant experience, and specifically the Lao community. The book is a slim little collection of 14 short stories that didn't take very long to read, about parents and children -- factory workers and manicurists and bus drivers and worm pickers -- trying to find their way in a strange new culture and make better lives for themselves. 

I found myself thinking about my dh & his family. He was born and raised here, as were his brother and all of his cousins, but their parents all came to Canada from southern Italy in the 1950s and 60s. I wrote a bit about their experiences when my FIL passed away three years ago.  I think anyone who has some degree of familiarity with the immigrant or refugee experience will recognize themselves and/or their families in these stories, no matter where they came from. (Dh is currently reading "The Bone Setter's Daughter" by Amy Tan, and even though it's about a Chinese-American immigrant family, he says it's all very familiar territory, lol.)  

I rated this book 4 stars on Goodreads. I'm not a huge reader of short stories. These were well written  (sometimes beautifully so) slices of life/snapshots, often with a little twist at the end. I think the ones I liked most were "Randy Travis" and "Chick-a-Chee" and "A Far Distant Thing." But they were all so brief and sparse and sometimes bleak... I found myself wanting more. (Which, I suppose, is ultimately a good thing...!)

This was Book #41 read to date in 2021 (and Book #3 finished in August), bringing me to 114%! of my 2021 Goodreads Reading Challenge goal of 36 books. I have now completed my challenge for the year, and am (for the moment, anyway...!) 19 (!) books ahead of schedule. :)  You can find reviews of all my books read to date in 2021 tagged as "2021 books." 

1 comment:

  1. Oooh, I like the sound of this, as I feel a connection to Lao communities, simply because they are so very similar to the northeast of Thailand - and the Thailand/Lao relationship is very like Australia/NZ (or maybe America/Canada?).

    I don't love short stories either. Which is kind of ironic, because as bloggers, that's really what we write. lol

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