Blood and Soap: Stories

by Linh Dinh

Blood and Soap is a breakthrough collection of modern-day fables from a wildly inventive American writer whose fiction has been called "terse and edgy" (Booklist) and "vividly imagined" (Kirkus Reviews). Dinh's gift is for constructing, in the manner of Italo Calvino, simple narratives that quickly frame larger questions; with a poet's timing, the author builds his stories to the one or few climactic sentences that brand them with unforgettable meaning. In one tale, a Vietnamese boy's self-guided, haphazard study of English gives way to a meditation on the universality of "Everything seems chaotic at first, but nothing is chaotic. One can read ants crawling on the ground; pimples on a face; trees in a forest." In another story, a man opens a newspaper and sees the photograph of a man he may have murdered, which he impulsively clips, only to feel that in doing so he unwittingly has sealed his "As soon as I finished, I realized what I had by cutting my father's likeness out of the newspaper, I had removed him from the world." The collection crescendoes in displays of raw creative power, as in "Eight Plots," a rapid-fire of three- and four-sentence summaries, and the brilliant, impressionistic "!"
Blood and Soap is an arresting collection from one of a small number of writers on the vanguard of American fiction.

Genres: Fiction, Short Stories, Poetry, Asian Literature

138 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 2004

Reviews

[Sally]

The stories are quick as bullets, many of them more allegory than traditional-short-story per say. Despite the length, this isn't something you want to breeze through -- it's something a reader would want to examine in microscopic detail. The logic and flow of the words on the page is enough to mesmerize and startle -- the events and characters often surprising.

These aren't just run-of-the-mill quirky characters, these are storybook characters whose motivations are often mysterious, but fascinate the reader (Ex: Prisoner with a Dictionary, in which a prisoner becomes obsessed with the dictionary of another language, and Stewart Crenshaw, in which a white man in the Civil War Era decides to enslave himself). Some of it is grotesque, involving no shortage of violence. The most prominent thread of this collection is the contemplation on language--the nature of words, translation, what gets lost, and the powers and failures of language, especially English. The voice in the stories is blunt, matter-of-fact, side-splittingly hilarious, sardonic, and at certain key moments, revelatory. Killer.

[Stephen Kirbach]

Dinh examines the arbitrary instabilities in language and the subsequent absurdities related to acquiring more of that. Likewise, he pushes the absurdities resulting from concealing primal urges and uncontrollable thoughts beneath a socially acceptable veneer.

[Cat]

Beautiful, minimalist prose, that can be so sad and funny all at the same time.

[Bintang · Rating 4 out of 5]

With an affinity to crime and misdemeanors, Linh Dinh poses these magical realism anecdotes as a way of blurting out your randomness. Sometimes you don’t have to dissect it and find what it means, sometimes you can just let that fly by and forget about it. But in days like these, with nothing as a certain thing, you’ll think of one of these proses and maybe you’ll scratch your head. Hey, at least you do some thinking in these hard times!

[Sheela Lal · Rating 4 out of 5]

Challenging read that forced me to expand how I understand the short story experience.

[Tayne · Rating 3 out of 5]

A playful, weird, and irreverent little thing. I'd call most of these stories closer to anecdotes than fables, but whatever they are, I'd be keen to read some more.

[Walk-Minh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Blood, that most ancient of symbols, has been offered up to purify and redeem the fallen; many believe it was sacrificed to absolve the sinners of the world and make them right again under the eyes of a higher being. Blood also has its more sinister and fatal connotations when it gushes uncontrollably, when people become "blood-thirsty" or "blood-suckers", when blood rots to black. Soap, as we know it today, is a fairly modern invention; it is utilitarian and somewhat of a killjoy. One uses soap to scrub off the ecstasy of a wonderful meal, to clear away the gaiety of a joyous celebration or to cover up the carnal sweat of midnight sex.

After having finished reading Linh Dinh's second collection of stories, Blood and Soap, I felt I was standing in the aftermath of literary mayhem and simply dazzled by the splatter. Soon thereafter, whenever I would be doing the most mundane, routine things, like getting on a bus, opening a door, or stepping out into the sun, splashes of Dinh's narratives flashed back at me: "A war is a working man's university."

Dinh does not waste his words and, thus, guarantees that you won't be wasting your time reading Blood and Soap. The majority of the stories place solitary protagonists in places and situations that closely resemble what we understand to be reality, but which has been pushed off-kilter by either the characters' own hands or the forces that Dinh pits them against. "A TOURIST WAS STABBED TO DEATH LATE LAST NIGHT IN CENTRAL PARK!" screams one of the characters from inside his apartment as he learns to overcome the silence of being foreign in the eyes of society from a New York tabloid. He inhabits the titillating gruesomeness of big-city crime, which wouldn't be so funny to the reader, if it weren't for the fact that this guy wants to learn English so much that he emulates the screaming tabloid headline by yelling back at it.

The book has built-in narrators who sneak in through your pores and the soft underbelly of your subconscious to guide you past those open windows where something out of the corner of your eye catches your attention and you just have to backpedal in order to confirm what you can't believe you thought you just saw. ("Melissa?") Dinh makes it easy to observe and sympathize with each character's humanity, no matter how inhuman it turns out to be.

Dinh has written a collection of stories so potent that if you flinch for just a second, you could lose all perspective and balance, and end up blaming the book for leading you astray and locking you in with your own degradation. His screwy fables and parables serve to replace the reader's own delusions, prejudices and neuroses with the author's.

"To acquire someone else's taste is a moral act. A bigot loves his mom's cooking and nothing else."

Many of Dinh's stories borrow at will from the sacred halls and galleries of history, and then turn them upside down and inside out ("Viet Cong University"). Dinh spreads reality so thin that he seems to be rewriting it on the parchment of his imagination. Elvis Phong is brought back to life with the help of a DJ reminiscing about Phong's mastery of epic moments in Vietnam's modern history through rock `n' roll songs. Follow the narrator and you will find out that Phong wrote a song called "Thoi Vao Gio" ("Blowing In The Wind") and a seminal album called "Dia Trang" ("The White Album"). The translations of the titles make you titter and think either Elvis Phong and the narrator are both insane or you have just stepped through a crease in time and into an alternate reality. Dinh's relationship with his birthplace can be compared to a plane hanging in midair after takeoff. "Destination is not at all important, only departure."

Blood and Soap will cheer up your sense of irony and confuse your sense of decency. What lessons his stories seek to impart are actually anti-lessons and instead serve as un-teaching tools that impart a wisdom that will leave you queasy: "A woman colludes with God at the beginning of the joke by giving birth. A man at the end of it, by killing." Dinh skillfully pulls you into his lesson plan and then turns on the lights, so that you find yourself in a room caked with blood, holding only a bucket of water and a bar of soap.

[Elaine · Rating 4 out of 5]

Blood and Soap is an unusual compilation of shorts/vignettes. If I had to make a comparison (though none would do justice to the book), I would say it is somewhat of a Hemingway, Tim O'Brien, and Julio Cortazar mixture. But one thing I don't understand is why there are some grammatical mistakes in this book. Is this on purpose? I feel like an idiot asking this question, but it kind of bothers me. Is Dinh trying to mimic the voice of a Vietnamese speaker by doing this?

That aside, my favorite stories in this book are the ones that poke fun at language: "Prisoner with a Dictionary," "!," "Key Words," and "Food Conjuring." I literally put the book down and thought for a good ten minutes after reading these. They're amusing.

In addition to his knack for finding the grotesque within the mundane, Dinh likes to revitalize old narratives. We've all heard the tale of the struggle between the rich man and the poor—it's as old as the Bible. But Dinh's "$," and one of my favorites, "Stewart Crenshaw," present surprising takes on the poor man v. rich story.

I also really liked "One-Sentence Stories," although some are difficult to interpret (which is true for many of Dinh's stories, particularly, "13"). "Eight Plots" was extremely entertaining, but the funniest of all is "What's Showing?," which I unwisely read while eating lunch and accidentally snorted rice up my nostrils. Not pleasant.

[Jacob · Rating 4 out of 5]

It has been a slow stepping into current fiction for me. One reason is the sheer amount of classics I feel compelled to read. But more important is the fact that I get jealous some writer just had their book published and I didn't. But I am working on being more open and less dismissive and Linh Dinh's "Blood Soap" was a reason to keep fighting the good fight. The stories are short and feel weightless which, initially, threw me off. Luckily, it was also the reason I finished the book and only when I took a couple days and found myself describing the many absurd, grotesque, and jolly moments in this collection, did I come to the decision that some authors may be better than me and therefore worth reading. Linh Dinh is one. You will enjoy.

(And fyi, he has a story in the upcoming issue of [sic]. That makes him a genius.)

[Stacey Nguyen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Linh Dinh refreshingly explores heavy themes like neocolonialism and racism while simultaneously shedding light on the most mundane aspects of existence. He discusses identity in a way that is neither didactic nor overly serious. His beautiful and poetic writing lingers in your head. It's funny and clever, although not overbearingly so. While I do think that some of his vignettes were limited in perspective, Blood and Soap was, overall, a pleasant and thought-provoking read.

[Adam P. · Rating 5 out of 5]

So focused and organized and exciting. Eerily personal at its most outlandish, yet weird and visceral at its most heart-felt. Dinh's "One-Sentence Stories" will blow you away, guaranteed, or your money back. Not really, but the book is really good

[terry · Rating 5 out of 5]

this is one of my favorite books. how the english language is used and manipulated is so brilliant. READ THIS BOOK! if you dont have it, i will get it for your birthday!!!

[Marisela · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a great book of short short fiction. Sometimes they appear to be prose poems, but I think that's up to the author to decide.

Very entertaining.

[Dustin · Rating 5 out of 5]

There's no way to describe Linh Dinh except the word "awesome".

[Scott Little · Rating 5 out of 5]

Good read in the hot desert in the middle of nowhere. Weird and wonderful. Reminds me a lot of Keret. We are all strangers and all lands are strage.

[Anne Le · Rating 5 out of 5]

A master of the microstory, Dinh amazes me with his Hemingwayesque tersity and Borgesian metanarratives.

[Erica Wright · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dog or wolf? Poetry or fiction? Either way, this is one of the most innovative and entertaining collections I've encountered. Watch out for the hotel ghosts.

http://ow.ly/X3Eke

[Ben Bush]

If you want compact Borgesian meta-fiction, Linh Dinh is about the best gig in town.