Nonfiction of the year: the best-written book on the Baillie Gifford Prize shortlist
Plus this century's best-written winner of the prize
COMING SOON:
—November is the busiest month for literary prizes, so we’ll be featuring the best-written books from their shortlists, and also from the century’s previous winners of these prizes. To avoid sending you too many posts, we’ll leave the recent releases until December.
—THIS SATURDAY: Eleanor Anstruther and Samuél Lopez-Barrantes will be joining me for a live video discussion of what we mean by the term ‘literary’. All of you are welcome to join us, and you can find more information here, restacks of which would be appreciated.
IN TODAY’S ISSUE
—‘I, whose unending obsession with the styling and maintenance of my hair begins at sixteen, should have asked Ba, when he could still remember, what hair product he used. I could try to fix my own hair in that same fashion, the way I tried on my mother’s gray sweatshirt after she died and discovered that I could fit inside its void’: the best-written work on this year’s shortlist for the Baillie Gifford Prize for nonfiction. The winner will be announced on the 19th of November.
—’The barked instructions, the fear of sinking to the tiled bottom along with the old sticking-plasters and hair-balls, combined to create an unconquerable anxiety. I somehow associated swimming not with pleasure, but with institutions, hospitals, conscription and war, with being ordered to do things I didn’t want to do’: the best-written winner this century of the Ballie Gifford Prize. This choice is part of our project to identify the best-written books of the century.
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THE SHORTLIST FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE FOR NONFICTION 2024
The Story of a Heart by Rachel Clarke (Abacus)
Question 7 by Richard Flanagan (Chatto)
Nuclear War by Annie Jacobsen (Torva)
A Man of Two Faces by Viet Thanh Nguyen (Corsair)
Wild Thing by Sue Prideaux (Faber)
Revolusi by David Van Reybrouck, translated by David Colmer and David McKay (Bodley Head)
The best-written of these is
do you know the way to san josé?
When does memory begin?
What memory is it that I seek?
And where, on the thin border between
history and memory, can I re
member myself?
Memory begins with Ba Má, their images like photographs, their story like a movie, the kind found in the black box of a VHS tape, in an era when I have long ago gotten rid of my VCR.
All our parents should have movies made of their lives. Or at least my parents should. Their epic journey deserves star treatment, even if only in an independent, low-budget film. Beautiful Joan Chen in her prime would play my mother; the young heartthrob Russell Wong, my father.
So what if neither actor is Vietnamese?
We’re all Asians here.
Joan Chen did play a Vietnamese mother in the big-budget Heaven and Earth, Oliver Stone’s biopic about Le Ly Hayslip, a Vietnamese peasant girl caught in the whirlwind of a terrible war. Sexy Russell, with his chiseled cheeks and pouty lips, could have been a movie star if Hollywood ever cast Asian American men as romantic leads. His slicked-back hair reminds me of my father’s in a black-and-white headshot from the 1950s, his hair agleam. I, whose unending obsession with the styling and maintenance of my hair begins at sixteen, should have asked Ba, when he could still remember, what hair product he used. I could try to fix my own hair in that same fashion, the way I tried on my mother’s gray sweatshirt after she died and discovered that I could fit inside its void.
In this movie flickering in my mind’s musty theater, the songs are composed by the legend Trịnh Công Sơn and sung by his equally legendary muse with the smoky voice, Khánh Ly. Their collaborations constitute the soundtrack of nostalgia and loss for Vietnamese exiles and refugees, played on cassette tapes at forty-five minutes a side, filtered through a haze of cigarette smoke and accompanied by Hennessy VSOP cognac. Wong Kar-wai directs in his typically moody, seductive way. The lighting? Dim. The mood? Romantic. The color scheme? Faded Polaroid.
And the actor who plays me? A cute little boy with big black eyes.
After the movie comes and goes,
he is never heard from again.
No one remembers his name.
Perhaps Wong Kar-wai and his cinematographer Christopher Doyle could cast their cinematic spell on our house by the freeway in San José, stained a dark brown perhaps meant to evoke tree bark, built from wood and shingle, stucco and silence, memory and forgetting.
Imagine the realtor’s shock when my parents, refugees not fluent in English, paid in full with cash.
For most refugees and immigrants, life is rented rooms or rented homes, overcrowded apartments or overstuffed houses, extended families and necessary tenants. Cluttered rooms. Bare lives. This is how Fae Myenne Ng describes immigrant living in her novel Bone. Her setting is an unexotic Chinatown, but at least it’s in coastal San Francisco. Who has ever written about provincial San José, an hour’s drive away, or shined the light of cinema on it? At least Dionne Warwick celebrated the city with a song: “Do You Know the Way to San José?”
Of course it’s not as good as the songs about San Francisco.
Our street didn’t even possess a name, like the Mango Street of Sandra Cisneros. Just a direction and a number, South Tenth, black iron bars on the windows. Our countrymen from the old world must have installed those bars, since they could not be opened from inside, trapping us in the event of fire. I blame our countrymen, always taking the shortcut. When some of them pour a cement patio for us, they forget to smooth it, leaving a surface with the texture of the moon.
With a classic San José flourish, the people who buy the house from us later pave the lawn for more parking. My mother used to recline on that lawn, posing to have her picture taken by my father. Our American photos are almost always in color, unlike most of our Vietnamese photos, where a glamorous haze illuminates my parents. My mother, on a grassy slope by a church, is resplendent in one of her many áo dài. My father, slim as one of today’s Korean pop stars, leans with his hip against his Toyota sedan.
His sunglasses have disappeared, dust blown away in all the lost detritus of our past. I could wear them now, be just as fashionable on Sunset Boulevard as he was with his automobile.
Most people owned only motorbikes, if they had even that much. Even today in the place where I come from, more people drive motorbikes than cars. As one joke puts it:
What do you call a Vietnamese minivan?
A motorbike.
In a black-and-white Nick Ut photograph on my living
room wall—not the one of Phan Thị Kim Phúc,
burned by napalm, running and screaming—
a man drives a motorbike, fleeing a battle,
two boys in front of him, wife behind
clutching another boy, two more
boys behind her, staring at
Nick Ut’s camera.
With insight, humor, formal invention, and lyricism, in A Man of Two Faces Viet Thanh Nguyen rewinds the film of his own life. He expands the genre of personal memoir by acknowledging larger stories of refugeehood, colonization, and ideas about Vietnam and America, writing with his trademark sardonic wit and incisive analysis, as well as a deep emotional openness about his life as a father and a son.
At the age of four, Nguyen and his family are forced to flee his hometown of Ban Mê Thuột and come to the USA as refugees. After being removed from his brother and parents and homed with a family on his own, Nguyen is later allowed to resettle into his own family in suburban San José. But there is violence hidden behind the sunny façade of what he calls AMERICATM. One Christmas Eve, when Nguyen is nine, while watching cartoons at home, he learns that his parents have been shot while working at their grocery store, the SàiGòn Mới, a place where he sometimes helps price tins of fruit with a sticker gun. Years later, as a teenager, the blood-stirring drama of the films of the Vietnam War such as Apocalypse Now throw Nguyen into an existential crisis: how can he be both American and Vietnamese, both the killer and the person being killed? When he learns about an adopted sister who has stayed back in Vietnam, and ultimately visits her, he grows to understand just how much his parents have left behind. And as his parents age, he worries increasingly about their comfort and care, and realizes that some of their older wounds are reopening.
Profound in its emotions and brilliant in its thinking about cultural power, A Man of Two Faces explores the necessity of both forgetting and of memory, the promises America so readily makes and breaks, and the exceptional life story of one of the most original and important writers working today.
RECOMMENDED:
THIS CENTURY’S PREVIOUS WINNERS OF THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE
The Third Reich: A New History by Michael Burleigh (2001)
Peacemakers: The Paris Peace Conference of 1919 and Its Attempt to End War by Margaret MacMillan (2002)
Pushkin: A Biography by T. J. Binyon (2003)
Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall by Anna Funder (2004)
Like A Fiery Elephant: The Story of B. S. Johnson by Jonathan Coe (2005)
1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare by James S. Shapiro (2006)
Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone by Rajiv Chandrasekaran (2007)
The Suspicions of Mr Whicher or the Murder at Road Hill House by Kate Summerscale (2008)
Leviathan or, The Whale by Philip Hoare (2009)
Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea by Barbara Demick (2010)
Mao's Great Famine: The History of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958–1962 by Frank Dikötter (2011)
Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory and the Conquest of Everest by Wade Davis (2012)
The Pike: Gabriele D'Annunzio, Poet, Seducer and Preacher of War by Lucy Hughes-Hallett (2013)
H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald (2014)
NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and How to Think Smarter About People Who Think Differently by Steve Silberman (2015)
East West Street: On the Origins of Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity by Philippe Sands (2016)
How to Survive a Plague: The Inside Story of How Citizens and Science Tamed AIDS by David France (2017)
Chernobyl: History of a Tragedy by Serhii Plokhy (2018)
The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper by Hallie Rubenhold (2019)
One Two Three Four: The Beatles in Time by Craig Brown (2020)
Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty by Patrick Radden Keefe (2021)
Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne by Katherine Rundell (2022)
Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World by John Vaillant (2023)
The best-written of these is
Prologue
For thou didst cast me into the deep,
Into the heart of the seas,
And the flood was round about me;
All thy waves and billows passed over me.
Jonah 2:3
Perhaps it is because I was nearly born underwater.
A day or so before my mother was due to give birth to me, she and my father visited Portsmouth’s naval dockyard, where they were taken on a tour of a submarine. As she climbed down into its interior, my mother began to feel labour pains. For a moment, it seemed as though I was about to appear below the waterline; but it was back in our Victorian semi-detached house in Southampton, with its servants’ bell-pulls still in place and its dark teak staircase turning on itself, that I was born.
I have always been afraid of deep water. Even bathtime had its terrors for me (although I was by no means a timid child) when I thought of the stories my mother told of her own childhood, and how my grandfather had painted a whale on the outside of their enamel bathtub. It was an image bound up in other childish fears and fascinations, ready to emerge out of the depths like the giant squid in the film of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, with its bug-eyed Nautilus, Kirk Douglas’s tousled blond locks and stripy T-shirt, and its futuristic divers walking the ocean floor as they might stroll along the beach.
I thought, too, of my favourite seaside toy – a grey plastic diver which dangled in the water by a thin red tube through which you blew to make it bob to the surface, trailing little silver bubbles – but which also reminded me of those nineteenth-century explorers enclosed in faceless helmets and rubberized overalls, their feet anchored by lead boots. And in my children’s encyclopædia, I read about the pressurized bathysphere, an iron lung-like cell in which men descended to the Marianas Trench, where translucent angler fish lured their prey with luminous growths suspended in front of their gaping, devilish jaws. I was so scared of these monsters that I couldn’t even touch the pages on which the pictures were printed, and had to turn them by their corners.
Southampton’s municipal swimming baths, with their verdigris roof and glass windows, were a place of public exposure and weekly torture on our school trips there. Ordered to undress, revealing chicken flesh and, on older boys, dark sprouting hair, we shivered in ill-fitting trunks as we stood on wet tiles which, I was told, could harbour all sorts of disease. Padding out into the echoing arena where weak winter sun threw mocking ripples on the ceiling, we lined up to plunge in the shallow end, ordered into the water by our PE master, a wiry-haired man with an imperious whistle on a cord around his neck.
Once in, we were told to hold the hand-rail and kick away with our feet. With my fingertips turning blue with the cold and my tenacious grip, I created enough white water to seem proportionate to my effort, although it was really an endeavour to disguise my ineptitude. Then we took a polystyrene float, crumbling at the edges like stale bread, and were instructed to launch ourselves across. The far side was as unattainable as Australia to me, and the reward for success – a piece of braid to sew on one’s trunks – was a trophy I was as likely to win as an Olympic medal.
I never did learn to swim. The barked instructions, the fear of sinking to the tiled bottom along with the old sticking-plasters and hair-balls, combined to create an unconquerable anxiety. I somehow associated swimming not with pleasure, but with institutions, hospitals, conscription and war, with being ordered to do things I didn’t want to do. At the beach I’d make my excuses when my friends ran into the sea, pretending I had a cold. Throughout my childhood and my teenage years, I lived with this disability; I even came to celebrate it, perversely, as a strength.
It was only later, living alone in London in my mid-twenties, that I decided to teach myself to swim. In the chilly East End pool, built between the wars, I discovered that the water could bear up my body. I realized what I had been missing: the buoyancy of myself. It was not a question of exercise: rather, it was the idea of going out of my depth, allowing something else to take account for my physical presence in the world; being part of it, and apart from it at the same time. In a way, it was a conscious reinvention, a means of confronting my fears.
The story of a man’s obsession with whales, which takes him on a personal, historical and biographical journey – from his childhood to his fascination with Moby-Dick and his excursions whale-watching.
All his life, Philip Hoare has been obsessed by whales, from the gigantic skeletons in London’s Natural History Museum to adult encounters with the wild animals themselves. Whales have a mythical quality – they seem to elide with dark fantasies of sea-serpents and antediluvian monsters that swim in our collective unconscious.
In ‘Leviathan’, Philip Hoare seeks to locate and identify this obsession. What impelled Melville to write ‘Moby-Dick’? After his book in 1851, no one saw whales in quite the same way again.
This book is an investigation into what we know little about – dark, shadowy creatures who swim below the depths, only to surface in a spray of spume. More than the story of the whale, it is also the story of our own obsessions.