Khuê Phạm’s first novel Brothers and Ghosts deals with a Vietnamese family scattered across three continents, from Saigon to Germany to Southern California. It was translated last year from German into English, and it’s met with a great deal of critical praise, including from Ocean Vuong, who called it “a groundbreaking work in German literature.” On the podcast we talk about the Vietnamese diaspora in Berlin and Orange County, about our mutual friends who translated the novel, and about why it might be too controversial for a translation into Vietnamese.
The brothers in question are called Sơn and Minh, and the narrator’s name is Kiều. Fair warning: Khuê’s audio wanders in and out a little. Engineers at Radio Free Mike have worked furiously to mitigate the problem, but if her sound seems to fade sometimes we promise it will come back in a matter of seconds.
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Resources:
Brothers and Ghosts, by Khue Pham
A review of Brothers and Ghosts, NPR
Mike’s visit to Cambodia to visit some former-hostage friends, in The New Yorker
Khue interviews Michael about pirates, Die Zeit
The Desert and the Sea, by Michael Scott Moore
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