The word “haunting” is often used to describe our interaction with the past. To write about the past of your own family – the people who in so many ways define us – is to be haunted in a very personal way. Why did our ancestors do what they did and how does knowledge of that affect our relationship with them, with their memory? Anam – André Dao’s debut novel that won a Victorian premier’s literary award for an unpublished manuscript – is a vivid, complex book that never shies away from the spectres that haunt.
Dao’s intention – at least on the surface – is to get closer to understanding his grandfather, a Catholic intellectual imprisoned by the Vietnamese communist government for 10 years. Anam, in this sense, is a deeply personal meditation on family memory.
At the same time, Dao’s reflections on what it is to know (or try to know) the past – to feel connection to it and to another place or idea of place – shows how fraught an activity it is. There are immense difficulties to remembering. It’s a battle against vanishing paper trails, disappearing or distorted recollections, nostalgia and romanticism. How is Dao to do his family history justice? And who is he writing for? Who is he even writing about? His grandfather, or his grandmother, or his extended family, or himself? These questions constantly taunt Dao but he never hides from them. Instead they drive him to produce a work of unusual power and beauty.
This labour, of remembering the family past, is an undertaking that requires courage and determination. There were so many times I could feel Dao’s anguish and frustration as he realises that the one hard-fought step he has taken to his grandfather has actually made the destination further away. Following the traces and threads found in family stories, photographs and other artefacts, we accompany Dao as he wades through a thickness of imagination and speculation.
In a sense, Anam is a strange kind of page-turner. I was sucked in as we jump between Cambridge – where Dao is studying and living with his partner, Lauren, and baby daughter, Edith – and across times and locations in Vietnam, France and Australia. It is, at times, disorienting. There’s a lot of turbulence but it is an essential aspect of Dao’s approach. And while it is a challenge to keep your bearings, Anam is beautifully written, something that keeps the reader from feeling too much motion sickness. The way Dao creates a scene – such as one where his grandfather flies to France to be reunited with his family – gives the reader an extra sense of stability.
Another memorable centrepiece is when the collective voices of Dao’s family – aunts, uncles and grandparents – are simultaneously set loose. All are speaking about their experience of waiting for Dao’s grandfather to be released from prison. It’s a cacophony of anguish that, for me, almost reoriented my understanding of what Anam is about. This experience of waiting is shared by the family but, at the same time, each experience is so unique and huge. Collectively, the memories of Dao’s family, the memories of that time, almost consume everything, overshadowing Dao’s initial intention to know his grandfather.
Concerned as it is with the story of the past, Anam also gives us a window into the writing of the book – in the present. Lauren plays a pivotal role, offering him at times brutal feedback, checks to his romantic delusion or obsession.
Their relationship is as engaging as any other part of Anam. Lauren is often sharply critical of Dao’s approach and her commentary is funny and incisive. Noting his tendency to get caught up in remembering and imagining “mournful, meaningless” moments of his grandfather’s life, Lauren notes: “The elegiac is apolitical … It sucks the air out of the anger and righteousness you need to change things. It makes a useful thing – a memory of injustice – into a pretty bauble.” This, and a host of other such moments, gives Anam an extra dash of self-reflexivity.
While it takes the reader on a wild and at times bewildering ride, it is equally a warm, tender book about family.
Anam by André Dao is published by Penguin Books Australia, $32.99
