I thought of Virginia Woolf when 92NY (formerly the 92nd Street Y) called off an event featuring Viet Thanh Nguyen last week because he had joined hundreds of other artists in signing an open letter in the London Review of Books that called for an immediate ceasefire and was highly critical of Israel. (Some staff members of 92NY’s Unterberg Poetry Center, where Nguyen was scheduled to appear, resigned in protest.)
Tugged at by historical paradox and personal history, memory is, for Nguyen, never a single thread and is often a political statement, and in A Man of Two Faces, his ineluctable new memoir, he does a dazzling job of embedding Woolf among the many ambiguities he has confronted over his career, beginning with his first novel, The Sympathizer, for which he won a Pulitzer Prize. Woolf, he writes—the East India Company up her family tree—afforded “that room of her own through five hundred pounds a year willed to her by an aunt in Bombay.”
