Slander: Calomnies Book

Like author Linda Lê, the young woman who narrates this novel is from Vietnam and is a writer, a “dirty foreigner writing in French.” The narrator has distanced herself not only from Vietnamese society but also from her family. Her story is an exercise in clear-eyed fury revealing three generations of a cursed family. The grandfather was a lunatic the family locked away and declared dead to avoid shame; the father is a failed artist and humiliated cuckold; the mother is a simpering beauty consumed with lust; the uncle is declared insane because of his incestuous love for his sister, who hanged herself. The narrator, on the verge of a profound depression ever since her mother told her she was illegitimate, alternates her story with her uncle’s journal. In an acid style burning with compressed lyricism and savage irony, these parallel monologues sketch misfortune’s family tree.

Linda Lê, who traveled at age fourteen from Saigon to France with a wave of “boat people,” is one of the leading young novelists on France’s brave new literary scene. Slander is Lê’s fifth—and most celebrated—novel.

Publishers Weekly

The two main characters of L's fifth novel are, like the author, Vietnamese migrs living in France. A young woman learns that she is the result of her mother's brief affair with a foreign officer. Desperate for a family figure she can trust, she writes to her banished uncle, who has only just left the French mental hospital to which he was committed long ago for carrying on a love affair with his sister. And there the matter stays for most of the narrative, which jumps back and forth between the suspicious uncle and the confused niece as they separately review their past and present relationships. The uncle reflects on the venality and hypocrisy of a family accustomed to pandering to whomever is in power. The niece tries to navigate between the conflicting pieces of advice from a succession of paternalistic lovers. L's intensity is the real thing and frequently darkly poetic ("She wants to be the heiress of my sorrows, the legatee of my vertigos"), but the novel only seems to go somewhere when minor characters appear: a love-struck shoe repairman; a fetishistic literary agent; a young prostitute. Alas, they come too late or too rarely to save the novel from being a self-absorbed, rather repetitive exercise in personal exorcism. (Nov.)