Meditations on the Mother Tongue

This week’s other featured books, “While You Were Gone,” by Sybil Baker and “Starting with Goodbye,” by Lisa Romeo, can be found by scrolling down below this post, or by clicking the author’s name on our Authors page.

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THE BOOK: Meditations on the Mother Tongue.

PUBLISHED IN: April 2017

THE AUTHOR: An Tran

THE EDITOR: Andrew Sullivan

THE PUBLISHER: C&R Press

SUMMARY: A deaf child discovers to her delight that she can communicate with zoo gorillas in her native language. An old man grieving for his departed wife looks to the giant turtle in Hanoi’s sacred lake for solace, believing it to be a god. An American scientist searches the mountains and rivers of Sumatra for signs of an otter believed to be extinct. A young man finds a surprising connection to his Vietnamese heritage when he takes up the acrobatic sport of parkour, motivating him to re-learn his forgotten first language.

In rich and vivid prose across twelve stories, men and women are displaced from their loved ones, their cultures and their homes, and look to the natural and spiritual worlds in search of anything that can offer a sense of belonging and lasting satisfaction. These are careful meditations on the desire to know one’s self and be known by others, where parents and lovers alike appear as gods or as ghosts, dominating and unknowable, and where the bonds between fathers and sons and brothers, men and women, husbands and wives, are built, tested and found lacking.

THE BACK STORY: Each of these stories represents a different take on working out the old traumas of being raised in a separate culture from your parents, the gulf of ethnic heritage and language, and the ways that this linguistic isolation manifests itself in other inter-personal relationships, and the dual consciousness that emerges from this conflict.

WHY THIS TITLE? The collection is eponymously named for the opening story, which was the last one to be completed. To me, it represents the ultimate conceit of the entire collection: this book is a series of contemplative explorations on aspects of personal identity that had been obscured through a lifetime of western assimilation, an attempt to restore what was lost and emerge from it a unified person.

WHY SOMEONE WOULD WANT TO READ IT: If a reader is looking for a glimpse into the experiences of second-generation immigrants in diaspora, the experience of isolation from family that comes with it, and the struggles to reconcile secularized modern culture with mystical and mythic traditions.

REVIEW COMMENTS:

“Early in this fine collection, one of Tran’s narrators remarks on the final tonal distinctions that are the only difference between one word and another in Vietnamese. I mention this because it’s also such a perfect description of Tran’s unique gift as a writer: he has an ear attuned to the subtlest of differences in tone that open to reveal a world of nuance and meaning in the in-between places. The people living there in his collection – second generation immigrants, a Deaf girl, the parents of a chronically ill child – are seekers and wanderers, wondering how to tell their own stories. And it is here where Tran shines: he writes fiercely into the gap for the misfits and outsiders of the world.” – Amber Sparks, author of The Unfinished World: And Other Stories.

“An Tran is one of the most gifted writers to appear on the DC lit scene in recent memory. These surprisingly varied stories about communication (and lack thereof) are so adventurous, intelligent, and wise (about humans and non-humans) that when the book was over I felt like I’d been scuba diving on Mars. Damn he’s good.” – Richard Peabody, editor at Gargoyle Magazine.

“There are ghosts inhabiting An Tran’s Meditations on the Mother Tongue. They are not haunting, though: they are reminders and etchings. They are not echoes, but the original voices sounding their guttural howls into deep caverns and awaiting return. Each of these stories lives with a presence lingering, a remembrance attached to what we might try to leave behind us. We pick up each one, each of An Tran’s stories, and there we are, holding what the ghosts have returned, and each one trembles with history, and each one unburies a treasure we do not know hides in the earth.” – Justin Lawrence Daugherty, Co-Publisher of Jellyfish Highway Press.

“An Tran’s stories are exercises in compassion. His characters move through some of the tightest spots available in our natural and man-made worlds, reminding us that the voices guiding us toward our noblest efforts and our baser impulses speak to us in tongues that everybody can understand.” – Aaron Alford, Managing Editor of Southern Humanities Review.

AUTHOR PROFILE: An Tran is a parkour coach, a nationally competitive powerlifter, a software developer, and a writer of fiction and essays from Northern Virginia.. His work has appeared in Southern Humanities Review, Gargoyle Magazine, Carolina Quarterly, Sundog Lit, and elsewhere, and has received a “Notable” distinction from the Best American series, nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and shortlisted for the Million Writers Award. He received his MFA from Queens University of Charlotte and currently lives in Northern California.

AUTHOR COMMENTS: “I believe a lot in Leo Tolstoy’s proposed idea that the relevance of art is in the act of communion between the artist and audience, with the work acting as a portal for the audience into the emotive experience of the artist. In these stories, I have tried to architect a simulation of sensory streams for the reader to inhabit, to live through these characters whom have felt what I have felt, though their histories may differ from my own. I hope, by wandering through this space, the reader is immersed into the experience of communion, and we will have shared something far beyond the limits of language.”

SAMPLE CHAPTER: https://sundoglit.com/an-tran/

WHERE TO BUY IT: C&R Press. https://www.crpress.org/shop/meditations-on-the-mother-tongue/

Amazon. https://www.amazon.com/Meditations-Mother-Tongue-Tran/dp/1936196719/

PRICE: $18

CONTACT THE AUTHOR: www.an-tran.com