Centering on a Vietnamese intelligence officer’s years-long ordeal in communist reeducation camps, The Afterlife of a Threadbare Jester offers a heartrending and an illuminating look at the Vietnam War and its aftermath. War, literature, religion, politics, loyalty—they are all expertly interrogated through the protagonist’s compelling voice and the memorable cast of characters he encounters. Despite the struggle and suffering, the story never veers into the sentimental or cynical. Instead, it returns again and again to the complexities of the human heart and its will to endure. This is not a novel of ism excoriation; it is, in fact, a story that seeks questions to the truths of life and asks the question: “How can you expect a man who’s warm to understand a man who’s cold?” A moving, unforgettable, and enlightening must-read.
Award-winning author Khanh Ha is a ten-time Pushcart nominee. He is the recipient of the Sand Hills Prize for Best Fiction, The Robert Watson Literary Prize, The Orison Anthology Award, The James Knudsen Prize, The C&R Press Fiction Prize, The EastOver Fiction Prize, The Blackwater Press Fiction Prize, The Gival Press Novel Award, The Red Hen Press Fiction Award, The Unleash Creatives Fiction Prize, and The Next Generation INDIE Book Award. He lives in New Jersey.
“Khanh Ha’s new novel, The Afterlife of a Threadbare Jester, is a tale of postwar Vietnamese labor camps that is both utterly harrowing and utterly necessary in these current parlous times. Through Ha’s arresting prose, we inhabit an inmate whose experience of great cruelty speaks not only of the past but resonates into the enduring dark complexities of the human soul. This is an important book from an important writer.”
— Robert Olen Butler, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain
“Ha is a writer of rare talent able to plumb the depth of the human heart in the smooth rhythm of a meandering river. For Ha, the setting plays the part of an ever-present character dictating the tone and mood of the stories. Ha’s work always put me in mind of Faulker in that it has a mythic quality that only the best writers are able to capture. At the same time, it is—at times brutally—realistic.”
— John Gist, author of The Yewberry Way: Book I Prayer, Lizard Dreaming of Birds, and CrowHeart
Check out an excerpt from the novel:
Outside the shack a cold norther was blowing. This ash rain falling, falling. In my hand a blemished potato, more precious than gold. I had lost count of those fallen sick. Most would not last this stark winter. Me, a walking skeleton. Have mercy, Sir Winter. I fantasized rice. I would bow to the ground, this gray-haired head dropped, and sing, Hail to the holy rice. I would chew slowly like a toothless senior masticating. But why did this stomach still feel empty?
I thought of a dear friend of mine. He died only a month back, not lasting this winter to see his release. Before he died he handed a piece of paper. “Don’t leave it out in the open,” he whispered into my ear. “For you to read,” he said, then tapped the side of his head. “I have it locked in here.”
I hoped his parents would read this poem, that he was a man, not a maggot:
They learned from chairman Mao: / Intellect is worse than a clump of feces
They reform us the inmates / and we transformed feces into rice
We killed our self-respect slowly / through endless hard labor
until one day we lost / all our humanity
In the end they have succeeded / in transforming us
into what they are / the maggots.
Outside I sat down leaning against the shack’s wall. Distant stars, just dots, like in a child’s eyes. Yet what I saw was simply blackness.
Of all the eyes watching the sky this night, how many naked eyes welled up with tears?
