How To Pronounce Knife
Souvankham Thammavongsa
McClelland & Stewart, 2020
Review by Leslie Palleson
In a recent interview with the Atlantic, Souvankham Thammavongsa describes laughter as the cornerstone of the stories in her debut collection How to Pronounce Knife.
“Laughter does the work that sometimes language cannot, and it demands that you read it closely in order to understand it,” she says.
Truly, this is a thread that unites the stories of this collection. “Edge of the World” opens with a mother’s laughter, “loud and wild,” her mouth “open so wide I could see the half-chewed chocolate mashed up against the inside of her cheek.” In “Ewwrrrkk,” a grandmother teases her granddaughter about her sexuality, laughing at her own crudeness, and the granddaughter recalls how her grandmother “sometimes let me touch her face and squeeze the skin to show the places where her laughter had been.” In “A Far Distant Thing,” a girl pretending to be dead starts laughing: “Small, soft chuckles like someone was tickling her. And then she let out a loud scream.” The laughter that runs through these stories lifts the characters from their heartbreak and their loss, offsetting the screams; the sobs; the breaking apart of families as they struggle to find belonging in a country that hasn’t even heard of their own; the memory of a father’s head disappearing as the family crosses a river to safety, where “the last sound he made wasn’t a sound, even.” It is this possibility of what they could be––the lives they could have––in juxtaposition with their lived reality, that infuses Thammavongsa’s characters with vitality, lovability, and hope.
Precise use of image and metaphor showcase Thammavongsa’s poetic ease, and blunt short depictions paint the scenes: a newspaper laid out every night on the floor as a table; a woman alone on a bench in a blue coat as the snow falls; another envying the network of ants, “their secret world of working together and lifting things greater than themselves.” The author masterfully reaches into the lives of her characters to pull out the truth and lays it upon the page, glaring, unavoidable and devastating.
For the most part, Thammavongsa’s characters are relegated to the “grunt work of the world.” Yet, despite their harsh realities, the characters in How to Pronounce Knife keep their hope and their dreams alive. In “Randy Travis,” a lovestruck young mother sends hundreds of cards to a celebrity that will never open them. In “A Far Distant Thing,” two girls watch a sunset, and one remarks, “It looks close, doesn’t it? Like it’s someplace we could walk to grab a piece of for ourselves.” As children and parents alike are pulled away from those that long for food that tastes of home, all their dreams and laughter cannot stop the shattering effect their reality has on family ties.
Even when characters understand their dreams cannot be realized, hope keeps them going. In “Mani Pedi,” a man working in a nail shop falls in love with a rich client. His sister tells him to forget it and keep his dreams small––“The size of a grain of rice”––but he replies, “Don’t you go reminding me what dreams a man ought to have. That I can dream at all means something to me.”
The stories are often told through the voice of a child who bears honest witness, not merely to the hardship experienced by her family, but more poignantly to how the need and desire to belong—or, to compensate for isolation—brings family members in conflict with each other, or worse, makes them ashamed of each other. In “How to Pronounce Knife,” the eponymous story shows how parents’ ignorance of English leads directly to the child’s inability to belong; she, who is never named, arrives on picture day in sweatpants only to be humiliated, pointed to as “out of place” by the teacher. Later the child insists, screaming to her class and teacher, that the “k” is pronounced in “knife,” as this is what her father has told her––landing her in the principal’s office. Here, the child sacrifices belonging for loyalty, but for how long will she do this? The pulling apart of families is deftly demonstrated in “Edge of the World,” where a mother clashes with her child who tells her she has learned at school that the world is round while the mother insists it is flat. “We were different people, and we understood that then,” the character says.
As they strive to belong or find connection, characters search for their truth, pitting their own identity against that which is imposed by others. In “Randy Travis,” a young mother becomes infatuated with the country singer while the father makes a heartbreaking attempt to be what she wants, sporting cowboy boots, changing the way he stands. In “Slingshot,” one of the few stories not concerning Lao refugees and the story for which Thammavongsa won an O. Henry Award, an adventurous septuagenarian having an affair with the much younger man next door must navigate what this means for her own identity: “He asked me to sleep over but I didn’t want to. I watched him with a sadness he couldn’t see. I didn’t want to be with someone who could do that- who could deny what I was.” Ten years later she looks through him when they encounter each other, “I wanted to be in the distance, beautiful and dark, spinning all by myself, in the clear.”
“Laughter is power,” Thammavongsa says in her interview with the Atlantic, and her characters desperately strive to hold onto their power; their hope. They are tenacious, driving forward to try to make sense of their displaced lives, turning the job of picking worms into a near art form, holding true to a steadfast belief in the power of hard work even where it seems to breed resentment. Most of the stories in this collection concern members of the Lao diaspora; Thammavongsa herself was born in a refugee camp in 1978 in Thailand, moving to Toronto at age one, and the familiarity with the displaced lives she portrays rings throughout.
How to Pronounce Knife reads so easily it could be enjoyed on a beach, but it deserves much closer attention than the hot sun would allow. Thammavongsa’s deceptively simple stories twist desire, hope, loneliness, and heartbreak into unsolvable puzzles, leaving the reader struggling to find solutions to questions that have no right answer. The reader is left trying to find their own footing, marvelling at the tornado swirling around them.
Leslie Palleson is a writer based in Deep Cove, North Vancouver. Her work has appeared in Room, Descant, onstage to sold out audiences at the Vancouver Fringe Festival, and has been shortlisted for the PRISM International Jacob Zilber Prize for Short Fiction. She is completing her MFA in creative writing at UBC, has been awarded a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council for her next literary project, and is a member of the editorial board of PRISM international.