Parallels by Vũ Đình Giang shocked me. While I refrain from spoiling its plot, allow me to share my experience when reading this novel, as translated by Khải Q. Nguyễn, to better explain how the book jolted me from expectations and why the experience provides a unique and valuable addition to the array of Vietnamese novels translated into English.
Parallels, originally published in Vietnamese in 2007 under the name Song Song, follows the lives of three homosexual men in an unnamed Vietnamese city. As established from the onset, it shifts focus between H, a relatively stable design firm employee; and G.g, his artist boyfriend, who seems disturbed from the beginning. A third character, Kan, who works with H, eventually enters to create a love triangle. Told via alternating perspectives interspersed with epistolary moments, the story flirts with surrealism before establishing reality as more frightening than any hallucination.
Cover of the Vietnamese original Song Song. Photo via Tiki.
Each of Parallels’ numbered chapters begins without establishing whose perspective is being offered, causing initial challenges in orienting oneself, particularly early in the book when reader tries to become acquainted with the characters and settings. Upon adjusting to this style, I could focus on what I believed to be a novel content to dwell on stylized depictions of the men’s mundane lives, augmented by articulations of emotional and psychological upheaval. About one-third of the way through, I sensed the book had settled into its final form where, absent a plot, the described moods, feelings, and ideas about art and life would constitute its gravity. The experience, I expected, would be a bit like how chapter 26 opens, with G.g opining: “People often complain that a year goes by too quickly. But for me, it often feels too long. Throughout the past year, there were no significant incidents or events. After work, I didn’t say goodbye to my colleagues; I just got on my motorcycle and left. After leaving any group of people, I immediately reverted to my original position, the position of an individual object. That rapid qualitative change was the result of a metaphysical needle being inserted into my body, draining the blood, and then pumping air in. I’d become an empty shell, a lifeless corpse, a hollow carcass. I’d be nothing but an empty nylon bag dragged along by the wind.”
An acrid strangeness fills the space where a plot could fit early in the book. H and G.g fritter away their time with bizarre games, including filling a basin with a putrid mixture of household goods and ingredients so as to drown the sun via its reflection. They paint mushroom caps so H’s co-workers think he is consuming poisonous fungi. They even discuss plans to murder an adopted puppy upon its first birthday while G.g repeatedly fantasizes about murder: “I didn’t feel guilty when I thought about killing him. I thought it was a beautiful idea, very poetic. Fly. Fly. Fly. I wanted to see how humans fly. I was waiting for a chance, and I would do it.”
Initially, I took these bouts of imagined violence as the angsty ramblings of poetic young adults, intoxicated by their macabre posturing. When G.g calls H in the middle of the night to announce that he is surrounded by wild wolves, H’s rational response assured me that there was a clear line between fantastic derangement and reality, and at least one of the characters knew which side we stood upon: “Do you think you’re lost in some wild forest? Listen to me, this is the city, and wolves can only come out of the Discovery Channel.”
However, soon the violence ramps up, and along with it, enough clarity to remove any uncertainties that could have cloaked terrific carnage in the surreal daydreams as had been suggested by a quote attributed to the puppy that comes before the first chapter: “Don’t rush to trust anyone, don’t try to find meaning in actions; maybe they’re simply a game, maybe it’s all the product of madness.” While I will leave it vague enough so as not to ruin a reading of it, the actions are in line with a grisly Hollywood movie that would need scenes trimmed before it could be screened at the local CGV.
Along with the violence, the novel’s approach to sexuality undergoes a radical shift in the second half of the book. At first, I was struck by how commonplace the homosexual lifestyles were presented, and found myself reflecting on how this reveals a normalizing of gay relationships in society. Love between men was referenced with the casual respect paid to any routine aspect of life. For example, early on H remarks off-handedly when describing G.g’s home: “So many times I’ve had to discard used condoms that G.g left under the bed, and I always had to have a tube of lubricant available, for G.g didn’t care.”
Somewhat rapidly, this changes, and the novel becomes filled with lurid details and graphic descriptions of BDSM. This particularly occurs as the characters share stories of their pasts, including Kan who recounts a lover who enjoyed being beaten:
“Kneeling, arms bent forwards at the elbows, he tilted his head upwards at an angle of about fifteen degrees. His thighs were wide apart. With that posture and his white, naked body, he looked like a frog with its skin peeled, patiently waiting for its prey.
The bait was the lashing of the whip.
The frog’s face deformed with each convulsion. Its mouth opened wide; its tongue was filled with foam, it groaned incessantly, and it soon reached the climax of its orgasm, sending a strong stream of semen onto the bed.”
While not interested in discerning morality, these depictions, which include a predatory relationship between a young, possibly underage man and a much older man who becomes his "adoptive father,” seem to relish in their potential to unsettle polite society.
Much like the transition from daydreamed violence to horrific bloodshed, this move from blasé depictions of sex lives to graphic retellings upended what I had assumed Parallels was at its core. These surprising shifts, I realized, are rather unique to Vietnamese literature translated into English. Many translated novels offer familiar narrative arcs that at least follow the rules they set out for themselves at the onset. While some such as Nguyễn Ngọc Tư's Water: A Chronicle, deviate from conventional storytelling techniques, plot structures and movements, relishing in intentional mystery and lack of closure, and others, including Thuận's Chinatown, refuse to meet reader’s expectations for tension and meaning, I have yet to read one that so flagrently upends the expectations it establishes.
Having finished the novel, I will return to the beginning, re-reading with awareness of where it ends and suspicion that the slippage of angst into mayhem should have been obvious, and I merely glossed over the hints. Or maybe I misunderstood the reality of the ending. And if either of these is true, it’s of little importance, because while the plot and its consequences, which are both legally profound and emotionally wrought, provided the tension that carried me through the book’s final half, it’s the unique style, voices, and heart-wrenching anecdotes that will remain with me. These are present from the very beginning.
In juicy, metaphor-rich prose, readers are gifted access to the complex interiors of complete individuals. It’s unclear which moments within these minds frightened me most; those when I heard echoes of myself, or recognized that the full spectrum of humanity contains individuals with diametrically opposing experiences and philosophies: “People thought I was simple, and a bit unstable. I didn’t give a fuck. Caring about what people thought was a waste of time. I had my own goals and principles. I lived for myself and because of myself; I did what was needed to meet what I aspired, demanded, worshipped. I knew I was selfish, but I was happy that way. I only cared about what I wanted, and I took up all its ramifications. Norms belonged to another paradigm that had nothing to do with me. I had my own universe, my own satellites, and I revolved around my own orbit.”
