Blood and Soap: Stories [ペーパーバック]

Blood, that most ancient of symbols, has been offered up to purify and redeem the fallen; many believe it was sacrificed to absolve the sinners of the world and make them right again under the eyes of a higher being. Blood also has its more sinister and fatal connotations when it gushes uncontrollably, when people become "blood-thirsty" or "blood-suckers", when blood rots to black. Soap, as we know it today, is a fairly modern invention; it is utilitarian and somewhat of a killjoy. One uses soap to scrub off the ecstasy of a wonderful meal, to clear away the gaiety of a joyous celebration or to cover up the carnal sweat of midnight sex.

After having finished reading Linh Dinh's second collection of stories, Blood and Soap, I felt I was standing in the aftermath of literary mayhem and simply dazzled by the splatter. Soon thereafter, whenever I would be doing the most mundane, routine things, like getting on a bus, opening a door, or stepping out into the sun, splashes of Dinh's narratives flashed back at me: "A war is a working man's university."

Dinh does not waste his words and, thus, guarantees that you won't be wasting your time reading Blood and Soap. The majority of the stories place solitary protagonists in places and situations that closely resemble what we understand to be reality, but which has been pushed off-kilter by either the characters' own hands or the forces that Dinh pits them against. "A TOURIST WAS STABBED TO DEATH LATE LAST NIGHT IN CENTRAL PARK!" screams one of the characters from inside his apartment as he learns to overcome the silence of being foreign in the eyes of society from a New York tabloid. He inhabits the titillating gruesomeness of big-city crime, which wouldn't be so funny to the reader, if it weren't for the fact that this guy wants to learn English so much that he emulates the screaming tabloid headline by yelling back at it.

The book has built-in narrators who sneak in through your pores and the soft underbelly of your subconscious to guide you past those open windows where something out of the corner of your eye catches your attention and you just have to backpedal in order to confirm what you can't believe you thought you just saw. ("Melissa?") Dinh makes it easy to observe and sympathize with each character's humanity, no matter how inhuman it turns out to be.

Dinh has written a collection of stories so potent that if you flinch for just a second, you could lose all perspective and balance, and end up blaming the book for leading you astray and locking you in with your own degradation. His screwy fables and parables serve to replace the reader's own delusions, prejudices and neuroses with the author's.

"To acquire someone else's taste is a moral act. A bigot loves his mom's cooking and nothing else."

Many of Dinh's stories borrow at will from the sacred halls and galleries of history, and then turn them upside down and inside out ("Viet Cong University"). Dinh spreads reality so thin that he seems to be rewriting it on the parchment of his imagination. Elvis Phong is brought back to life with the help of a DJ reminiscing about Phong's mastery of epic moments in Vietnam's modern history through rock `n' roll songs. Follow the narrator and you will find out that Phong wrote a song called "Thoi Vao Gio" ("Blowing In The Wind") and a seminal album called "Dia Trang" ("The White Album"). The translations of the titles make you titter and think either Elvis Phong and the narrator are both insane or you have just stepped through a crease in time and into an alternate reality. Dinh's relationship with his birthplace can be compared to a plane hanging in midair after takeoff. "Destination is not at all important, only departure."

Blood and Soap will cheer up your sense of irony and confuse your sense of decency. What lessons his stories seek to impart are actually anti-lessons and instead serve as un-teaching tools that impart a wisdom that will leave you queasy: "A woman colludes with God at the beginning of the joke by giving birth. A man at the end of it, by killing." Dinh skillfully pulls you into his lesson plan and then turns on the lights, so that you find yourself in a room caked with blood, holding only a bucket of water and a bar of soap.

I've read some of these stories over and over. Thought provoking and haunting. Completely incredible yet Dinh weaves them so well they become real in your mind - reminds me of Gabriel Garcia Marquez short stories.