Parallel

Description

Song Song (Parallel) is Vũ Đình Giang‘s début novel, first published in 2007. It is widely considered as the best gay fiction in the Vietnamese language. Unapologetic and daring, this work deserves to be on the same shelf with the sexiest works by some of the best living gay writers.

Parallel opens, and ends, with the news about the suicide of Leslie Cheung, a famous Hong Kong actor and singer, a gay icon of Asia. The novel tells the story of life, love, lust, illusion, and violence revolving three characters: G.g, H, and Kan.

In addition to its ambitious experiment with language use and its erosion of grammatical order, it is the first literary work written about homosexuals in Vietnam that goes beyond the cliché of sex workers and transvestites, or characters struggling with their own identity. Parallel also explores complex aspects of lust, BDSM, bestiality, and pederasty. It destigmatises mental illness, childhood abuse, sex, alcoholism, and debunks the conventional view that children are not capable of sexual desire, and thus should be treated as ‘sexless creatures’.

Violence is ubiquitous in Parallel: domestic violence, school bullying, animal cruelty; violence returns to incubate another life of violence. So is solitude, permeating every line.

Parallel has been translated into French as Parallèles by Yves Bouillé.