The book "Destroyment and Redemption - the spring of talent" collects 6 lectures presented by writer - author Viet Thanh Nguyen in the series of prestigious Norton lectures at Harvard University in 2024, a forum that honors the most outstanding family ideology in the world.
In "Destroyment and Redemption - the spearhead of technology", Viet Thanh Nguyen goes straight to the center of the thorny questions that the contemporary world is facing: What makes a community pushed to the brink? Can literature save lives or does it contribute to destruction? How to speak for others without taking their voice?
The work is a blend of the sharp thinking of a political - cultural scholar and the simmering emotions of a son, a father carrying cracks in memory.
In the opening chapter, Viet Thanh Nguyen talked about the feeling of "difficulty" and "unreal" standing on the podium of Harvard - where he felt like an impersonator among the symbols of Western intellectuals. But from that sideline position, he established the ideological foundation for the entire book: The path of a minority writer is always surrounded by 3 temptations - idealizing suffering, cutting off the community to achieve fame, and being truly gay with difference.
The following chapters expand the book's thinking range. From the spiritual tragedy of the mother - who is both a source of inspiration and a victim in his literature - Viet Thanh Nguyen faced the ethical issue of "speaking instead", questioning the social expectations for ethnic minority writers to become representatives of the whole community.
He considered it a sophisticated oppression and affirmed that a writer can only be honest when writing with the breaks of the heart, not with the representative task given by the majority. The passages about his mother, where love blends with betrayal, became one of the most touching and haunting parts of the work.
In the following chapters, author Viet Thanh Nguyen continues to expand his thinking about exiled and ethnic minorities. The story of a father - from colonial Vietnam to a journey across the sea and working silently in the US - became a mirror reflecting the divided history of the Vietnamese community.
The book ends with a chapter filled with light, where the author talks about the joy of creation and love for the dead, about the opportunities that create cohesion between people. In his final words, that his father was "very happy", he found the strength to continue writing, to continue living, and to believe that literature can still guide the way in the era of violence and uncertainty.
In his introduction to the Vietnamese edition, Dr. Tran Xuan Thao commented that Viet Thanh Nguyen's book is "a special dialogue space, where readers reflect the darkness of themselves and of history". He wrote that reading and listening to the author's experiences "is also an act of self-fulfillment and community, by daring to face things that are difficult to say but need to be said".
On the author's side, Dr. Vo Huong Quynh shared that each chapter of the book is a vivid sketch of the writers who have shaped the author's creative philosophy, mixed with haunting memories of the deceased mother's depression.
"The book is a painful tragic song and also a strong accusation, drawing out a fragile line between love and betrayal, memories and forgetting, the ego and the life - the lines that are always agitated and indelible" - translator Vo Huong Quynh commented.
With a strong ideological structure, human depth and the ability to connect private stories with global issues, "Destroy and Redemption" is one of the important publications of Vietnamese writer Thanh Nguyen.
