Mãn

July 27, 2015
Thúy, whose debut, Ru, was a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, has written a lyrical and spare second novel. Mãn, a Vietnam-born woman living in Canada, enters into an arranged marriage at the behest of her mother, who wants someone to care for her daughter when she dies. The unnamed husband, who fled Vietnam as a "boat person," is a Montreal restaurateur and quickly involves Mãn in the life of his restaurant. She finds friends, including the effervescent Julie, who builds Mãn a "culinary workshop" for her fusion Vietnamese-Western dishes. It becomes a local institution. After writing a book that takes her to Paris, Mãn meets Luc, who grew up in his father's orphanage in Vietnam before the fall of Saigon. Luc jolts Mãn into the possibility of a new way of living, where love is a "precise destination" that can take her away from the "humdrum life" she leads. Mãn's relationship with Luc is written with tenderness, though any sense of its domestic implications with her husband is conspicuously absent. . No chapter of this slim book spans more than two pages. Every section is annotated with Vietnamese phrases that serve as a thematic introduction, and Thúy strings the vignettes together to form a powerful, poetic narrative.