Riflessi di Guerra. Storia e Antirealismo Nella Narrativa di Viet Thanh Nguyen by Giacomo Traina (A Book Review)

Giacomo Traina’s Reflections of War: History and Antirealism in Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Fiction (Ombre Corte, 2024) offers a timely and meticulous reassessment of the Vietnam War and its enduring postmemorial legacy. Framed through Viet Thanh Nguyen’s assertion that “all wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory,” the study interrogates the competing historical, political, and cultural narratives surrounding the conflict, foregrounding the long-neglected Vietnamese perspective. Divided into two complementary sections, Traina’s volume first reconstructs the complex twentieth-century history of Vietnam, tracing the nation’s descent into war and its aftermath through a Vietnam-centric approach that restores the agency of Vietnamese actors and emphasizes the transnational and multilayered dimensions of the conflict. The second section 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 imperial historiographies and expose the entanglements of memory, power, and representation within the American cultural imagination. By conceptualizing the Vietnam War as both a physical and metaphorical “war of Vietnams,” Traina situates Nguyen’s work within a broader genealogy of diasporic memory and cultural negotiation, wherein the “war after the war” continues to be fought through competing myths, counternarratives, and postmemorial reimaginings. In bridging historical reconstruction with literary analysis, Reflections of War not only enriches Italian scholarship on Vietnamese American literature but also lays the groundwork for further studies into the transnational reconfiguration of war memory, identity, and narrative form.