Like author Linda Le, the young woman who narrates this novel is from Vietnam and is a writer, a "dirty foreigner writing in French." The narrator has distanced herself not only from Vietnamese society but also from her family. Her story is an exercise in clear-eyed fury revealing three generations of a cursed family. The grandfather was a lunatic the family locked away and declared dead to avoid shame; the father is a failed artist and humiliated cuckold; the mother is a simpering beauty consumed with lust; the uncle is declared insane because of his incestuous love for his sister, who...