Mrs. Rossi's Dream
By: Khanh Ha / Narrated By: Feodor Chin, Andrew Eiden
Length: 8 hrs and 58 mins
Three words only? Mesmerizing, Gritty, Redemptive
I wasn’t quite sure what to expect when I was going into Mrs. Rossi’s Dream as I barely glanced through the Publisher’s Summary (Hurray for meeeee!) as, usually, the PS has zippo to do with what’s actually going on. Still, I expected an audiobook that was going to be about a ghost and memories.
And it kinda sorta is, but it’s not done in a clean and easy way as the time period we’re talking about, and there are a few interweaving lines of time, starts during the Vietnam War with Giang, the 39-year old war veteran who did his time for the North then went and served the South… who lost… making him serve a 10-year sentence in a re-education camp. He currently, when the book opens in 1987, is caretaker at a hotel in Vietnam, and he lives a somber tho’ not completely isolated existence. Still, he’s not asked to feeeel a whole helluva a lot, and that suits him just fine as he whiles away time at the hotel, and draws beautifully when he gets the chance.
This numb existence is interrupted when an older American woman, Mrs. Rossi, and her Vietnamese-born adopted teenaged daughter join the hotel as clientele. Mrs. Rossi is on a mission: She wants to find the remains of her son Nicola Rossi, a lieutenant who went missing after a firefight. He was wounded and left behind, but he was alive when last seen, and Mrs. Rossi knows that all wounded were put to death immediately if found by the enemy. So where’s his body? Did he escape to somewhere else, was killed somewhere else?
Hard drinking through the years got her nowhere, and so here she comes to Vietnam open and with firmness and determination. Giang is oddly drawn to the two women, and the young daughter especially captivates him because, and he doesn’t see why, she is kind to him, draws stories and feelings from him (Don’t worry, there’s nothing grossly romantic about it). Though she came from a Vietnamese orphanage and has known sorrow, and though she was there through her mother’s descent into drinking and despair, she seems to be innocence and acceptance personified. Giang would like to back off several times, but the girl is just so engaging.
Feodor Chin (rocking narrator of Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet) does Giang’s perspective—super well! And narrator Andrew Eiden covers the other side of the Vietnam War spectrum: As the haunting words of the lost Nicola Rossi. Both narrators deliver beYONd competent performances, adding greatly to the mood, adding greatly to the horrific imagery that both Giang and Lt. Rossi convey.
You want both sides of the war? Here you go. You want atrocities and brutality? Oh, here you go. Because through author Khanh Ha’s superb writing and excellence with the sense of environment, the sense of spirit(s), the listener is transported into a couple of living hells. But where he shines is with the odd introduction of a GI named Ian, a man who straddles both worlds with his respect and growing love for the Vietnamese people and his duties as an American at war, subordinate to baser warriors. And we see it when (Kinda a spoiler, and I apologize…) he becomes a prisoner and uses his Vietnamese to communicate even as he struggles to stay alive as the sick and starving enemy. His story will haunt you just as much as Giang and Nicola’s experiences with wholesale fear, destruction, slaughter.
Through it all, Mrs. Rossi follows a paid guide to places (She has a crude map) of where her son’s remains might be found. Through mud, the jungle, through the foulest of weather, all she wants is her son back, signs that there once was a much-loved young man on this planet. I didn’t feel her pain so much, as written, but I did so very much get Giang’s, well, not guilt so much as self-consciousness in his awareness that he was on the killing side. But we as the listeners are well aware that both sides were simply desperate to survive, killing by rote and terror, and maybe even committing atrocities with the memories of freshly dead friends still on their minds.
Yes, it’s a gritty listen. And we come to see how unfathomable war really is, how futile as both sides come together in the end, showing how the dead, though not even their own, have been honored through the intervening years.
The details are mesmerizing, adding so much to the narrative, to the experiences of our characters. One is transported to a different country with new foods and smells. And one is most certainly transported to hellholes that seethe with fire and slaughter which, however senseless through the lens of history, is actually oh so necessary at the time.
Feodor Chin and Andrew Eiden, along with Ha’s deliberate pacing and marvelous development of characters as they grow and come together, and with an ending that’ll leave you stunned and weeping?
There you go: A story you’ll remember for quite some time to come…
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