Anton Disclafani: The After Party , 9780399573187, paperback May 2017, available in hardback 9781594633164, Riverhead Books /Penguin Random House US, (Nach der Party, C. Bertelsmann, April 2017, 19,99)

Anton Disclafani is a female author, in case you are wondering. Her first book “The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls”, a book I greatly enjoyed, established her as a keen observer and storyteller of what happens to women who fall outside the moral codex set by rich families in the US in the Thirties.

Her latest book “After the Party” is set in the roaring Fifties in Houston/ Texas where drinks and money flow as freely as the oil wells producing these riches. Disclafani does a great job in vividly portraying Houston’s social life and party scene of the very rich.

Joan Fortier is one of the golden girls born into an extremely rich, first class Texan family. Glamorous, blond and beautiful she is the center of the Houston party scene with her childhood friend Cece Buchanan always at her side. Whereas Cece graves stability, a happy marriage and family life, Joan is more reckless and has a much wilder appetite not always in synch with the rigid rules of a Houston society scene with its debutant balls and parties. When Joan goes suddenly missing for a year and eventually returns much changed, Cece desperately tries to find out what happened to the one person she has felt closest to. The story unfolding over 368 pages of love, betrayal, scandal and friendship captivated and entertained me until the very end. Atmospheric, cleverly plotted women’s fiction of high quality.  

Viet Thanh Nguyen: The Refugees, 9780802126399, hardback, Grove Press, no German edition yet

With his novel “The Sympathizers” Viet Thanh Nguyen won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

I have always been interested in Vietnam, one of the most beautiful countries I ever had the pleasure visiting.  My generation still recalls the Vietnam War vividly, the boat people and the wave of Vietnamese refugees coming to the US and Western countries.  “The Sympathizers” is still sitting on my reading list but I just downloaded and read his recently released collection of literary short stories, “The Refugees”.

These short stories written over a longer time period of time give an excellent portrait of Vietnamese refugee life in the US. But they apply to feelings all refugees share, especially those born in their parents adopted country struggling with the scars immigration left on their family history.  

These are multi-facetted stories about everyday life such as that of the refugee who is given a new home in the apartment of a gay couple in San Francisco of the Seventies and the culture shock he suffers.  A Vietnamese women, whose husband is suffering from dementia, is extremely irritated when he starts calling her by another woman’s name, more tenderly than ever, clearly the lover he left behind.  Disturbing to me was the story of a man who has returned to former Saigon, now Ho Chi Minh City, where he has given the children of his new family with his former mistress and now second wife exactly the same names as the family he left behind in the US. And the bully of an ex-military man who is visiting his bi-racial daughter who is now living in Vietnam working for a charity organization, where they run into the same conflicts dividing them already in the US.  The sense of struggle of having two identities runs like a thread through all these keenly observed, beautifully crafted stories.