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

Carlotta Ferrando

doi:10.31261/rias.18453

Published: 2025-12-31

Vol. 18 No. 2 (2025)

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

Carlotta Ferrando

Website: https://phd.uniroma1.it/web/CARLOTTA-FERRANDO_nP2080970_EN.aspx

Section: REVIEWS

https://doi.org/10.31261/rias.18453

Abstract

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.

Keywords:

Viet Thanh Nguyen , Postmemory , Vietnam War , Vietnamese American literature

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Ferrando, C. (2025). Riflessi di Guerra. Storia e Antirealismo Nella Narrativa di Viet Thanh Nguyen by Giacomo Traina (A Book Review). Review of International American Studies, 18(2), 189–195. https://doi.org/10.31261/rias.18453

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Carlotta Ferrando

carlotta.ferrando@uniroma1.it
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9678-7842

Affiliation:

Sapienza University of Rome, Italy / University of Silesia in Katowice, Poland Italy

Bio Statement (e.g., department and rank)

Carlotta Ferrando is a PhD student in English Literature, Language and Translation at Sapienza University of Rome (curriculum in Literary Studies), in cotutelle with the University of Silesia in Katowice, Poland. She graduated in July 2021 with an MA degree from the Programme in Comparative Literatures (University of Turin) having defended her dissertation on contemporary American Literature titled “Family Dynamics in Blank Coming-of-Age Novels: Less Than Zero, The Lost Language of Cranes and Generation X,” after obtaining a bachelor’s degree in Italian Literature. She is currently working on a PhD project focused on the representation of female mental illness in contemporary American novels. She is a member of AISNA.

Vol. 18 No. 2 (2025)
Published: 2026-01-09

eISSN: 1991-2773

10.31261/RIAS

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

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Carlotta Ferrando

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