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 Anam – André Dao’s debut novel that won a Victorian premier’s literary award for an unpublished manuscript – is a vivid, complex book that never shies away from the spectres that haunt.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.
