The Brooklyn Rail

When I first read a story of Linh Dinh’s several years ago, I understood myself to be in the presence of an extraordinary literary voice. The story is called "!" Its narrator tells it after "perusing innumerable newspaper accounts" about a certain Ho Muoi, who has been sent to jail for "being a fake English teacher." Ho Muoi had discovered—and invented—English as a soldier in the North Vietnamese Army when his battalion captured an American soldier who proceeded to get sick, become delirious, and "blather for hours on end." Ho Muoi phonetically transcribed the soldier’s rantings (one of my favorite mind-bending ironies of this story is that to transcribe the soldier’s blatherings, Ho Muoi presumably used the Vietnamese alphabet, quoc ngu, which is itself a phonetic roman-alphabet transcription of the spoken Vietnamese language invented by the 17th-century French missionary Alexandre de Rhodes), and from these notes he extrapolated all of English, on the theory that "anything made by man can be duplicated: a chair, a gun, a language, provided one has the raw materials."

Linh Dinh’s stories bring into doubt things like summaries of short stories; I hope mine suggest at least some of the philosophical and political extravagance and hilarity of "!," which is now part of Dinh’s short-story collection Blood and Soap, just published by Seven Stories Press. The total effect of Blood and Soap is impossible to describe. As Dinh mentions below, it owes a certain debt to Jorge Luis Borges, but uses Borgesian metafiction and genre-bending to depict a sense of absurdity, confusion, and displacement peculiar to being a contemporary world citizen. Blood and Soap, though often very funny, is haunted by the loneliness and terror experienced by the individual in the global economy.

When I spoke to Linh Dinh by phone in mid-April, he had just returned to the United States from Certaldo, Italy, where he had been living for two years as a fellow of the International Parliament of Writers’ Cities of Asylum program. As befits the author of Blood and Soap, he was staying at a friend’s apartment and looking for a place to live. —Matthew Sharpe

Matthew Sharpe (Rail): You studied painting in college, right? So how did you make the transition from painter to writer?

Linh Dinh: Well, I was writing poems at the same time, and at some point I just had to give up one because you can’t focus on two and expect any sort of success. And painting is just so expensive—to maintain a large space, and the equipment. So I switched to writing exclusively. At some point I said, look, I don’t want to be a failure in two things. I want to try to be something in one thing.

Rail: Or even being a failure in one thing cuts your losses by half.

Dinh: Exactly. (They laugh.)

Rail: How about writing short stories? When and how did that happen?

Dinh: Short stories were more of a deliberate thing. I wasn’t inspired to write short stories. I had to figure it out and start from scratch. Before I had ever written a short story, I edited and translated an anthology of short stories that was published by Seven Stories Press in 1996 called Night, Again. And also I did a magazine in Philadelphia called The Drunken Boat, and I used to write little sketches for it, so that was the very beginning.

Rail: How did you figure out what a story is?

Dinh: I was so ignorant. You know, clean up my syntax, learn how to punctuate properly, really learn the very basics, what makes a sentence work. How to set up a dialogue. It was all self-fumbling, I didn’t take any workshops or anything. I like to just teach myself. And also, just looking at people you admire, see how they did it.

Rail: Whom do you admire?

Dinh: A bunch of people. Céline was an early inspiration. And Kafka. Kafka has remained a steady presence. And Borges. And other people come and go.

Rail: What is it about Céline that you like?

Dinh: Of course all the energy. And his dark sense of humor. And the grittiness of his observations. He was in there, he came into contact with a lot of people. And that sort of physical willingness to engage people was very attractive to me.

Rail: Now that you mention it, you share a certain biological sense of humor with him, the humor and strangeness of the body, and a kind of unsqueamish representation of the body.

Dinh: Right. But a guy like Borges was the other extreme. He lived through books. He didn’t live through his body. He didn’t have sex, he didn’t fall in love, or he fell in love very seldomly. So that was the other model, the guy who lived strictly through books. It’s very easy for writers to lock themselves up their rooms and surround themselves with their books. I think that’s why some writers try to pose as men of action, they want to compensate for it. It’s so easy to become a nerd as a writer. Borges was a fantastic nerd, he was the ultimate nerd, but so what, right?