André Dao’s debut novel, Anam, recently won the $15,000 Unpublished Manuscript Award in the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards. The novelist describes his work as a fictionalised family history “concerned with memory, inheritance, colonialism, home and belonging.”
The judges’ comments include: “Anam is a lucid, stylistically confident and unforgettable genre-defying novel that explores memory, intergenerationality and family legacy through an inquisitive and thoughtful narrator. The reader is guided effortlessly through the narrator’s exploration of his grandfather’s imprisonment in Vietnam, his own time in Cambridge, parenthood and life in Melbourne.”
Congratulations André! We’re thrilled to publish the following extract from the novel.
– Sheila Ngoc Pham, diaCRITICS Contributing Editor
The Cambridge University Library is a brick cathedral topped by a twelve-storey tower, a great thrusting phallus from which a steady plume of steam billows out, visible for miles around. Germaine Greer, thinking, no doubt, of the building’s 1930s rationalist-fascist style – the architect, Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, is most famous for that temple of electricity on the bank of the Thames in London, the Battersea Power Station – said that the library looked like the kind of place books are burned, rather than read.
The entrance to the library is forbidding enough – the library’s six-storey wings run north and south of the tower like fortress walls – but once inside, through the pass card activated turnstiles, the Library opens itself up to the willing reader. Straight ahead, down a long corridor called Carnegie Hall, between two internal courtyards – concreted, grey, and uninviting – is the Main Reading Room, a vast, high-ceilinged chamber lined with shelves and divided by rows and rows of lamp-lit tables at which studious figures can always be found hunched over books and computers. But I am most interested in the stacks, which can be explored in the less capacious wings that form squares around the internal courtyards, running anti-clockwise from the entrance beneath the tower: North Front, North Wing, North Reading Room Corridor, the Main Reading Room, the Supplementary Catalogue Corridor, South Wing, South Front. Granted, the ground floor of each wing, filled as each is with Edwardian and Victorian bookshelves, and decorated with paintings of what I guess are long-dead librarians, is more in keeping with the palatial dimensions of the Main Reading Room. But any sense of grandeur is entirely absent on the upper five storeys. When I first ventured up the stairs of South Front I had the impression of having entered the sort of labyrinth the ancients constructed to keep tomb raiders out, or else to keep something terrible in. Which is what makes those upper floors so promising: there, the stacks are cheap metal shelves cramped too close together, barely fitting beneath low ceilings. The aisles between the stacks are narrow and poorly lit. Some wings have views to the outside, with small study desks pressed up against the wall, and at each a solitary reader, a pile of books before her, diligently turning pages. Elsewhere, the stacks are hidden in gloom, where narrow slits let in a negligible amount of natural light from the internal courtyards. In these dark corners no readers are to be found, only the occasional searcher, who appears suddenly under the fluorescent lights and disappears just as quickly towards Ancient East Asian Literature or New Institutional Economics.
To search up here feels like being the victim of an elaborate hoax, for the stacks are littered with signs, printed out on sheets of A4 paper or scrawled in highlighter on the back of some discarded print out, bearing cryptic instructions such as:
CASE 34 HAS NOW BEEN RELOCATED TO SOUTH WING FLOOR 2 OVERFLOW SHELVES
306.B.1.203-306.B.1.3218 CONTINUES ON FAR SIDE OF STAIRWELL
IF YOU CANNOT FIND THE BOOK YOU ARE LOOKING FOR, CHECK OVERFLOW TABLES
This last sign was crossed out in red pen, replaced by a new scribble that said: PLEASE IGNORE, THIS IS A LIE.
The overflow tables are scattered throughout the wings, with books stacked three deep on top of them. Sometimes the books spill down to the floor, still in neat rows, and one is left with the impression that in time, every surface will be covered in books: the corridors and the many stairwells, window ledges and fire extinguisher cabinets, so that the books will have to be stacked one on top of the other, until they begin to resemble row after row of self-propagating growths, a cancer of unread words.
For now, there is still room to walk along the stacks, if not always enough light to see the way, and it is among these shelves, in the middle of Michaelmas term, that I am looking for a book that has nothing to do with my studies, nor really to do with my grandfather, but which has nevertheless appended itself to the index card for him in my mind’s archive. I had first come across the book in Paris, at a flea market at the Marché St Germain, one of those typically French stalls selling leather bound editions of Mallarmé, Sartre, Pascal. I was with my father – we had both answered the summons to come to Paris to see my grandfather, who, it was feared, was on his deathbed. But now, some three weeks after our rushed arrivals (me from a writing residency in Hanoi, my father from early retirement in Melbourne), the urgency had dissipated as my grandfather lingered in the hospital in Creteil, so my father and I spent our mornings in Paris before trekking back out to the suburbs for the evening visiting hours. On this particular day we had a long lunch at a bistro in the sixth, where I had taken my father to see Sciences Po, the elite university I’d gone to on exchange. This was not a typical activity for my father and I – perhaps the last time we’d dined out together one on one was when I was ten and living with him alone in Canberra, and the highlight of our week – and a break from our nightly fare of instant noodles – was our regular trip to the Burger King in Belconnen Shopping Centre, which was, at least at that time, thrillingly US of A themed, complete with red leather booths, coin-operated jukebox, and unlimited soft-drink refills. This French bistro was altogether different, and it was possible to imagine, as we sat facing a mild autumn street in Paris, watching a suited waiter run to the grocery store on the other side of the street for another demi-bouteille of the Sancerre for our table, that this was something we did regularly. When, walking off the extra wine, we came across the flea market at St Germain, an ersatz but dignified market for the wealthy widows of the Rive Gauche, it was my father, whose reading habits had been so strictly catechistic, who stopped to point out the Maupassant and the Balzac and the Gide, books of his youth, he said, growing up in wartime Saigon but imagining, nevertheless, the very streets we were walking along that day. And it was then, just as my father finished his surprising speech (we did not, as a rule, talk about literature), that I saw it, Trần Đức Thảo’s Phénoménologie et matérialisme dialectique.
Contributor’s Bio
André Dao is a writer, editor, researcher, and artist. He is the co-founder of Behind the Wire, an oral history project documenting people’s experience of Australian immigration detention. He is also a producer of the Walkley-award winning podcast, The Messenger.
