Friday, March 23, 2018

Book Note: Ticket to Childhood

Nguyen, That Anh. Ticket to Childhood. Trans. William Naythons. New York: Overlook Press, 2015.

This is only tangentially connected to Shakespeare, but it's intimately connected to Vietnam, and I'm interested in places where Shakespeare and Vietnam interact.

The brief novel Ticket to Childhood invites its readers to look at the world through the eyes of a group of eight-year-old boys and girls in Vietnam. It's a compelling narrative that presents the kinds of things kids do as well as what they might think about them years later.

In the sample I'm providing, our narrator talks about his love for instant noodle when he was a kid. That segues to a comment about Romeo and Juliet (there's the Shakespeare for you), and then to some reflections on Vietnamese traditions of dating and courtship.






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Unless otherwise indicated, quotations from Shakespeare's works are from the following edition:
Shakespeare, William. The Riverside Shakespeare. 2nd ed. Gen. ed. G. Blakemore Evans. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997.
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