Shade and Breeze by Quynh Tran: 4-star review

Quynh Tran’s first novel arrives in English translation with numerous Finnish and Swedish literary prizes. Originally published in Swedish, it is the story of a Vietnamese mother and her two sons living in a small town on the west coast of Finland. (The details of their situation are not disclosed, but it is implied that they are refugees.) The younger son, our narrator, is a precocious pre-teen. Seduced by his verbal talent, he willingly abandoned his extracurricular football practice to devote himself more to study and writing. Her mother – known here as Má – is equally ambitious, driven by self-confidence. On the other hand, his older brother, the adolescent Hieu, has a less disciplined figure: preoccupied with girls, indifferent to education, incapable of controlling his character.

The beautifully unfolding story in Shade and Breeze is very much about struggles of belonging, but Tran is more interested in the divisions within the family unit than in his characters’ experiences as intruders in a unknown country. The narrator feels excluded from Má and Hieu’s shared past. At the heart of his unhappiness is an episode that occurred a long time ago, shortly after the trio arrived in Finland, when he was still a baby. Má hatched a plan to pick and sell the plump blueberries that carpeted the surrounding forests during the warm months. (“Beautiful summers”, that’s what they say about the archipelago on which they live: conducive to “leisure in the open air”.) Má left the narrator, too young to participate in the gathering festival fruits, in the care of a friend in town while she, Hieu, her friend Lan Pham and their aunt Tei Tei spent a weekend in the forest.

Years after the expedition, in the present time of the novel, the narrator comes across a photograph, hidden between the pages of one of his brother’s books, Foragers. He becomes obsessed with imagining the details of the trip. With increasing strain and detail, he loses himself in the “light and sound” he conjures in his mind, tunneling into “the incomprehensible whir of dense, invisible swarms in the light and darkness of the forest » – whose topography becomes a fantastic amalgam of Northern European forest and South Asian jungle.

Thus, among the descriptions of daily life taking place in the present, which constitute the bulk of the narrative, are the narrator’s imaginings of this moment in the family’s past. Kira Josefsson’s translation is lucid and hypnotic throughout, but the prose is most fascinating during such lush, blurred written scenes – “an uninterrupted stream of images that arrived in fits and starts, like jellyfish in the water under my eyelids.