Parallels by Vũ Đình Giang (English translation by Khải Q. Nguyễn), the first Vietnamese queer novel to be translated into another language (the French translation by Yves Bouille in 2014), is not a novel for the faint-hearted; nor is it a novel for the easily distracted. The novel follows the interlinked relationship of three queer men living in an unnamed Vietnamese city: G.g is a playful artist who incessantly devises imaginative and at times violent games, like a quest to kill the sun; H is his lover, a graphic designer who often acts like G.g’s caregiver; and Kan is H’s intriguing, good-looking, ill-tempered colleague. Moving between each of the men’s perspectives without any label to indicate who the narrator is in each chapter, this fever dream of a book simultaneously highlights the similarities between the characters’ experiences and shows how they remain at a distance from one another, like parallel lines that never meet.
Living in a “bungalow on the outskirts of the city,” an unnamed one gritty with regular sheets of heavy rain, G.g invents games that involve killing and poisoning. It begins with killing the sun, drowning it in a puddle, or killing a chair in the house by breaking one of its legs and spilling red paint on it. G.g documents each of these games as part of his art, while H, between buying G.g food and worrying about what G.g might do to himself, plays along, offering ideas and at times seemingly enjoying these inventive experiments. The relationship between H and G.g appears to be one between a carer and an unwell loved one—yet the strains between them deepen as H becomes close with his colleague, Kan.
In tandem with this development, G.g’s games escalate, and the target of his killings become living beings, such as the “wolves” that come to his door at night, or a boy who has verbally attacked him in the neighborhood. At this point, however, the line between play and reality begins to blur. G.g uses the name Wolf to refer to the puppy that H adopts in order to keep Kan from killing it, so perhaps the “wolves” outside his house are merely stray dogs. The boy, referred to as Owl, is an elusive and at times illusory figure. He often materializes from a bush, and then disappears in a flash, as if he is not a real person but a character in G.g’s games. Further disrupting the sense of reality are additional non-human points of view that interject throughout the narrative, including p, which seems to denote the paper on which G.g writes, and Camera, the lens which records G.g’s games. p holds the weight of the emotions and memories, at times becoming exhausted with it. Camera merely observes the visible within the limitations of the games, though it provides the closest thing to a bird’s-eye view in a narrative tinted with the three main character’s unique perspectives.
The ambiguity about what is real and what is not applies to the characters themselves: G.g, H, and Kan are never spotted in the same room at the same time. And the first-person point of view used for each character’s narration without clear denotation of who is speaking means that their voices tended to blur into one another as the book moves from one chapter to the next, and only as the chapter continues do details in past events arise and provide some indication of who is narrating. This switching of perspectives between characters, often through short chapters, as well as between humans and non-human observers, is a powerful break from contemporary Vietnamese literary conventions—it is at once a reflection of Vũ’s multidisciplinary background as a writer and visual artist, and a way to circumvent heteronormative narratives which dominate Vietnamese stories about love, sex, companionship.
Often in off-handed comments, and sometimes in intimate moments of the night, the characters let slip their separate fixations on how they are alone in their suffering, even when they are surrounded by people who claim to love them. H appears to be fine most of the time, taking care of G.g and being a good listener to Kan, though underneath his insistence that he is happy about going against social norms, he seeks the feeling of being needed in his friendships and relationships. In a chapter shown through p’s perspective, G.g muses on the immutable distance between him and his mother who does not quite understand his artistry or his lifestyle: “You are on the riverbank and I’m always in the water; it will always be like this.” Kan, often seen as a harsh and cynical person by people around him, reveals how his mother’s violent bitterness in the aftermath of his father leaving her has casted a shadow over his life. The company these three characters give one another provides a brief reprieve from these insular spirals, though in moments of need they also drift apart from each other. The violence they inflict on others—G.g through his murderous games, H through the distance he keeps between himself and G.g, Kan through his careless attitude—reflects the evil that each character has been conditioned by those around them to see in themselves.
In a way, the exaggerated, and at times surrealist, quality of the narration serves as a reminder that these evils, these faults that the characters believe are so inherent to their being, are indeed not so concrete after all. And yet the very real and human thing that they do is to hold on to these sufferings on their own.
Parallels
by Vũ Đình Giang
translated by Khải Q. Nguyễn
Major Books
Thảo Tô is a writer from Vietnam. Her short story, “Love in the Time of Migration”, is the winner of the 2024 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize for fiction, and her other stories have been published in Sine Theta Magazine and diaCRITICS.
