RIFLESSI DI GUERRA. STORIA E ANTIREALISMO NELLA NARRATIVA DI VIET THANH NGUYEN BY GIACOMO TRAINA
RIFLESSI DI GUERRA. STORIA E ANTIREALISMO NELLA NARRATIVA DI VIET THANH NGUYEN BY GIACOMO TRAINA

Summary/Abstract: Giacomo Traina’s Reflections of War: History and Antirealism in VietThanh Nguyen’s Fiction (Ombre Corte, 2024) offers a timely and meticulousreassessment of the Vietnam War and its enduring postmemorial legacy.Framed through Viet Thanh Nguyen’s assertion that “all wars are foughttwice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory,” the studyinterrogates the competing historical, political, and cultural narrativessurrounding the conflict, foregrounding the long-neglected Vietnameseperspective. Divided into two complementary sections, Traina’s volume firstreconstructs the complex twentieth-century history of Vietnam, tracingthe nation’s descent into war and its aftermath through a Vietnam-centricapproach that restores the agency of Vietnamese actors and emphasizesthe transnational and multilayered dimensions of the conflict. The secondsection offers a sustained analysis of Nguyen’s fiction—particularly The Sympathizer(2015)—through the theoretical framework of Critical Refugee Studies,illuminating how Nguyen’s antirealistic narrative strategies challenge imperialhistoriographies and expose the entanglements of memory, power, and representationwithin the American cultural imagination. By conceptualizingthe Vietnam War as both a physical and metaphorical “war of Vietnams,”Traina situates Nguyen’s work within a broader genealogy of diasporic memoryand cultural negotiation, wherein the “war after the war” continues to be foughtthrough competing myths, counternarratives, and postmemorial reimaginings.In bridging historical reconstruction with literary analysis, Reflectionsof War not only enriches Italian scholarship on Vietnamese American literaturebut also lays the groundwork for further studies into the transnationalreconfiguration of war memory, identity, and narrative form.

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